It would have been just a little fun to have been in Yankee Stadium 62 years ago this afternoon.

You could have watched the only perfect game in World Series history — and still been home in time for supper.

Perfect is a 2009-published (by New American Library) account by lawyer/author Lew Paper of that perfect game by Don Larsen, the New York Yankee unheralded starter that day. Larsen and the Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers, 2-0, that afternoon and would go on to win the Series in seven games.

Mickey Mantle homered and Hank Bauer knocked in the game’s only other run with a single to beat Dodger starter Sal Maglie. Maglie had 10 strikeouts in the Dodgers’ 6-3 victory in Game 1 at Ebbets Field.

Larsen needed only 97 pitches  to beat the Dodgers in Game 5; only Brooklyn shortstop Pee Wee Reese was able to get to a 3-ball count, and that was in the first inning.

Larsen’s mom couldn’t watch. She was in California for the 1 o’clock Eastern Time start and didn’t listen on radio or watch on television. “Seems like every  time I watch him, he loses. So I just don’t do it,” she told a reporter.

His dad, long separated from Larsen’s mom, watched the game on a TV set in Berkeley.

I didn’t watch it because I hadn’t gotten around to being born yet.

Paper writes that Larsen walked off the mound after getting Duke Snider to fly out to end the seventh and had his first thought about the possibly of a no-hitter; he later admitted to not knowing at the time what a perfect game was.

Larsen ducked into the tunnel beneath the stands for a cigarette. Mantle walked by. “Well, Mick,” the righthander said, “do you think I’ll make it?”

Baseball superstition is that no ballplayer makes a reference to the possibility of a no-hitter during a game. Mantle stared at Larsen and walked away, quiet. “Larsen understands,” Paper wrote, “but he is not happy. ‘It was,’ Larsen said later, ‘like a big black shadow surrounded me and kept me apart from everyone else.”

Turned out OK though.

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