The perfect game. It’s literally what it says it is. From start to finish, a pitcher has gone all nine innings without allowing a single base runner. From 1903-the start of the 2023 season, only 21 pitchers have ever thrown a perfect game. It has happened once in Boston Red Sox history.
To find that performance, we have to go way back in history to a time when the Red Sox were called the Americans. The change happened starting with the 1908 season. Several years earlier, Cy Young pitched the one perfect game in the franchise’s history.
The only Red Sox perfect game came from Cy Young as a member of the Boston Americans
The year was 1904. Life was a bit different back then. The Boston Americans were coming off of a World Series victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates a season earlier. The World Series era had begun in 1903, ushering in the continued growth and popularity of this game.
Record-keeping wasn’t the best in those days but we do know that on May 5, 1904 there was a perfect game thrown by Cy Young.
Against the Philadelphia Athletics, Young went all nine and struck out 8 batters. The 3-0 win at the Huntington Avenue Baseball Grounds came against fellow future Hall of Famer Rube Waddell. Young had his work cut out for him but he managed to throw the first perfect game in the World Series era. No pitcher for the Americans or Red Sox have done it since.
The cousin of the perfect game, the no-hitter, has been far more frequent in the Red Sox and other teams’ histories. In fact, Young pitched a no-hitter on June 30, 1908 for the ball club when they were first referred to as the Red Sox. It was the third of his career which includes the perfect game and a no-no in 1897 with the Cleveland Spiders.
Entering the 2023 season, the most recent Red Sox no-hitter was Jon Lester’s on May 19, 2008. Oddly enough, the most recent no-hitter in MLB prior to that was the one Clay Buchholz delivered on September 1, 2007.