Jay Lucarelli is 31, lives in Akron, Ohio, and for the better part of a week he did one thing: fire up an MVP Baseball 2005 emulator on his laptop, take the mound as Roy Oswalt, and try to no-hit the Red Sox. According to MLB.com, he started this quest on July 30 and was putting in roughly 8 hours a day on TikTok Live, all in pursuit of a perfect game with a pitcher he picked because he grew up watching him for the Astros.
The final box score: Astros 3, Red Sox 0, three outs recorded and zero hits allowed.
The number attached to this thing kept climbing all week. Some posts had him past 1,400, others north of 2,500 by the time it wrapped, but the overlay burned into the actual stream read Attempt Counter: 1993 when it finally happened. That's not a typo or a bit — that's a man throwing the same simulated game roughly 2,000 times until the Red Sox lineup went cold for nine straight innings.
The moment of completion — a comebacker snagged by Oswalt himself sealed the perfect game, with the Red Sox lineup shown at .000 on the night.
There's something fitting about how it ended, too. The last out wasn't a strikeout or a routine grounder to short — it was a liner hit right back up the middle that Oswalt speared himself. One fan summed up the poetry of it succinctly, noting the last out being a lineout to Oswalt was almost too on-the-nose for a stream that had become entirely about him.
Last out being a lineout to Oswalt is so poetic
Oswalt himself needs no introduction to anyone who watched Astros baseball in the 2000s. He went 163-102 with a 3.36 ERA over a decade in Houston, made 3 All-Star teams, led the NL in wins in 2004 and ERA in 2006, and was named MVP of the 2005 NLCS when the Astros made their first World Series appearance. He was never a perfect-game guy in real life — his brush with history came via a combined no-hitter in 2003 that he didn't even finish, exiting after one inning with an injury. So there's a nice bit of irony in Lucarelli chasing digital perfection with a guy whose real career flirted with no-hit history but never quite closed it out solo.
None of this is really about baseball strategy or roster construction — it's about the grind. Nearly 2,000 failed nine-inning simulations is a genuinely absurd amount of repetition for a video game from 2004, and that's exactly why it worked as internet content: people tuned in daily just to watch the misery compound, and the payoff hit different because everyone had been riding along for the failures. Barstool's baseball account framed it as a miracle, and honestly, after a week like that, it kind of was.