From the Now It Can Be Told Files: Dallas Braden was burdened by a virulent hangover when he hurled the 19th perfect game in major league history on May 9, 2010.
He had only himself to blame.
“I wasn’t following protocol,” he told Susan Slusser, A’s beat writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, earlier this week. “Until that day, I had never treated a start or the day before a start the way I did that day.”
It’s not an untold story in baseball. In 1970, Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis threw a no-hitter against the Padres with — he said — LSD in his system. “I started having a crazy idea in the fourth inning that Richard Nixon was the home plate umpire, and once I thought I was pitching a baseball to Jimi Hendrix, who to me was holding a guitar and swinging it over the plate,” he said years after the fact.
Twenty-eight years later, the Yankees’ David Wells threw a perfect game against the Twins. In his autobiography, Wells said he got one hour of sleep after attending an all-night “Saturday Night Live” cast party. He said he was half-drunk with bloodshot eyes and monster breath.
In “Ball Four” author Jim Bouton recounted the day that a hobbled Mickey Mantle, who was not anticipating playing, was called on to pinch-hit. In the throes of a Hall of Fame hangover, Mantle walloped a mighty home run to the huzzahs of the Yankee Stadium faithful. “Those people don’t know how tough that was,” Mantle said, per Bouton.
Back to the man of the hour:
Braden lost his mother to cancer in 2001. He was scheduled to pitch the Mother’s Day game against Tampa.
“It’s just a day you’re trying to be get by,” he said. “You’re waiting for 12:01 to roll around so it’s over. It’s not like I was telling myself, ‘Let’s get crushed and tomorrow will be awesome.’”
But that’s the way it turned out.
———
©2020 The Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.)
Visit The Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.) at www.mercurynews.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.