SPORT

DURING the eighth inning of the Detroit Tigers-Cleveland Indians game Wednesday night — the inning in which Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga recorded his 22nd, 23rd and 24th consecutive outs — I tried to recall who it was who’d compared the sensation of watching a nail-biting baseball game to having the flu. Sitting in front of my television, I diagnosed, at worst, a bad cold. The flu arrived in the ninth, followed, post-game, by what felt like pneumonia. Awaking the next morning, I wondered if I’d had a high fever and hallucinated the whole thing.

For those unaware, Galarraga threw a perfect game on Wednesday night at Comerica Park in Detroit, though the record books won’t acknowledge it. The first-base umpire, Jim Joyce, called the 27th Cleveland hitter, Jason Donald, who’d hit a soft infield grounder, safe at first base, though replays — and it may be the most replayed play in baseball history — showed Donald to be out. Galarraga went from becoming only the 21st pitcher in Major League history to throw a perfect game (and the third in four weeks, a convergence of perfection that can be expected to recur with Halley’s Comet-like regularity) to one of the countless in Major League history to throw a one-hit shutout.

I’d talked on the phone to my father during the game’s late innings, doubting the evidence of my eyes. Was Galarraga — by no means the staff ace — really throwing a perfect game? And was it me, or was Galarraga getting close calls at the corners? My father — who called a tough strike zone back when I was a kid and practiced pitching behind the garage of our house in Detroit — agreed. Giving Galarraga the benefit of the doubt was only just. If you want to spoil a perfect game, the home-plate umpire, Marvin Hudson, seemed to be telling Cleveland, get a hit. Don’t expect me to call ball four.

And then Joyce called Donald safe at first.

Then the replays — soon to be baseball’s Zapruder film — began. Each angle shows the same thing: Donald was out. And each time, Jim Joyce signals safe. “Why is he safe?” Rod Allen, one of the Detroit TV announcers, asks once, twice, three times. Though most iconic announcing calls are bellowed when repeated (“The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” and “Havlicek steals it! Havlicek stole the ball!”), Allen’s question is, by announcer standards, barely above a whisper, his tone poised between heartbreak and incomprehension. The scale of the error sinks in. “Jim Joyce — no,” Allen says.

Rather than watch baseball Wednesday night, I should have been reading up on local news reports. The problem was that I didn’t really understand the numbers in any of them. Newt Gingrich told the state’s business and political leaders that the City of Detroit should attract business by charging zero tax on new investment for 10 years. It wasn’t clear to me how those all those zeroes would tally up to equal prosperity.

Mayor Dave Bing and the City Council differed on the numbers in the city’s budget cuts; the council was after the bigger number. Sales at the Big Three automakers were up, but I hadn’t really understood any auto numbers since the bailouts and bankruptcies. The national economy was said to be improving, but long-term unemployment was now at its highest level ever. How did that square?

Nope, 27 up and 27 down: those were numbers I could comprehend, at least until Joyce made the safe sign. The only story I seemed able to get my head around was Ford’s announcement that it would drop its Mercury brand — a sound decision by Detroit’s soundest carmaker.

By the morning after the game, the blown call had become big news nationally and internationally, and Jim Joyce was being unfairly lumped in with BP executives and the Israeli Defense Ministry. And yet the absolute class displayed in the call’s aftermath by Galarraga, Joyce and Tigers manager Jim Leyland — nobody’s perfect, I made a mistake, these things happen — seemed to put the matter to rest.

Then Michigan’s politicians — overseers of the state with the country’s highest unemployment rate — got involved, issuing proclamations, resolutions, strongly worded this-and-thats. One, Representative Thaddeus McCotter, wrote a letter to baseball commissioner Bud Selig saying that “only the truth will uphold and honor the integrity of the game; and the truth is that this game was perfect.” He told an ESPN reporter, “When this happened, the feeling here in Detroit was this could only happen to us; this was just one more thing on top of everything else.”

How much special pleading can a city, a region, a state sustain? When I saw my father on Thursday afternoon — less than a day after Galarraga’s perfect non-perfection, though it seemed much longer — we agreed that everyone should let it go, as the primary participants already had. (Selig eventually declined to overturn the call.) “It was a win,” my father said. “Maybe it’ll give them some momentum.”

It did: the Tigers won Thursday afternoon’s game in a blowout. Before that contest began, General Motors gave Galarraga a Corvette.

“They should have given him a Saturn, or a Pontiac,” my father said, mentioning two of G.M.’s defunct brands. He meant no disrespect to Galarraga, or to Saturns or Pontiacs. He owns a Pontiac. It was merely his Detroit practicality reasserting itself, part of the collective return to earth the day after something that had been, briefly, so elevating. “They need to clear out all those discontinued models,” he said.