Martin Perez flirted with a no-hitter after an unplanned last-minute start

What happened

Martin Perez took the mound as an unplanned starter — reportedly without much warning to anyone, including, it seems, Perez himself — and proceeded to flirt with a no-hitter. Per Mark Bowman on X, the hour leading up to Perez's unexpected appearance was, by any reasonable measure, chaotic, and two details in particular capture the texture of it: a phone call Perez made to his wife, and a Seinfeld reference deployed by manager Walt Weiss.

The specifics of what Bowman's full piece contains beyond those details are not reproduced here, but the broad shape of the story is clear enough. A pitcher who was not scheduled to start found himself starting. He then came close to throwing a no-hitter. That is, in the long and occasionally absurd history of baseball's pitching logistics, a fairly remarkable sequence of events.

Why it matters

Unplanned starts are not unheard of in baseball — the sport's roster mechanics practically guarantee a certain number of them across a long season — but they are almost never the occasion for a near no-hitter. The two outcomes exist at opposite ends of the preparation spectrum. A no-hitter, or even a serious flirtation with one, is typically the product of a pitcher at the peak of his command, working through an opposing lineup with precision and purpose. An unplanned start is, by definition, the product of something going sideways.

The fact that Perez reportedly came close to combining those two things — the improvised and the historic — is what gives this story its particular texture. It is the kind of thing that, if you tried to write it as fiction, an editor would send it back with a note about plausibility.

Walt Weiss reaching for a Seinfeld reference to describe the situation is, in its own way, a useful data point. Seinfeld, as a cultural artifact, is most often invoked to describe situations that are simultaneously mundane and completely unhinged — a show about nothing that somehow kept producing scenarios of escalating absurdity. If that is the frame Weiss chose, it suggests the hour before first pitch was not merely hectic in the ordinary baseball sense, but genuinely strange in a way that required a specific kind of shorthand.

What we don't know yet

The confidence level on the underlying report is moderate. Bowman's post on X links to a fuller account, but the details available in the sourced material are limited to the broad strokes: unplanned start, near no-hitter, phone call to wife, Seinfeld reference. The precise circumstances that made Perez's start unplanned — whether a scheduled starter was scratched, whether a roster move was involved, whether this was a bullpen game that evolved into something else entirely — are not specified in the available material.

It is also not reported whether Perez completed the no-hit bid, how deep into the game it extended, or what the final line looked like. "Flirted with a no-hitter" is the characterization per Bowman, and that is where the available record stops. The distinction between a no-hit bid that ends in the fifth inning and one that ends in the eighth is not a small one, operationally or historically, but it is not a distinction the available material allows this desk to make.

The phone call to Perez's wife is described as part of what "paints a pretty good picture of the zaniness," per Bowman, but the content of that call is not reproduced in the sourced material. One can imagine the general shape of a conversation in which a professional pitcher tells his spouse that he is, in fact, starting tonight, having not known that an hour ago — but imagining it is not reporting it, and this desk does not do the former in place of the latter.

What to watch

The obvious follow-up question is whether Perez slots into the rotation on a more formal basis going forward, or whether this was a one-time emergency deployment. Unplanned starts can sometimes be the moment a pitcher forces a club's hand — a performance that makes it difficult to send him back to whatever role he occupied before. Whether that dynamic applies here is not reported.

What is worth watching, in a general sense, is how the club handles the pitching situation that apparently created the opening for Perez in the first place. If a scheduled starter was unavailable — for whatever reason — that underlying situation presumably still exists and will require some kind of resolution. Roster mechanics being what they are, a range of options exists under general league rules: the injured list for pitchers runs a minimum of 15 days, a rehab assignment clock can run up to 30 days before a pitcher must be activated or moved, and a club can carry up to 26 players on the active roster through August, with that number expanding from September onward. Which, if any, of those mechanisms is relevant to the situation that put Perez on the mound unexpectedly has not been reported.

The Seinfeld reference, for its part, requires no follow-up. It is complete as a unit of information. Walt Weiss saw something, reached into the shared cultural memory of a generation of baseball managers, and produced a reference that apparently fit. That is the kind of detail that does not need resolution — it just needs to be noted, appreciated, and filed under the broader category of baseball being, on its best days, genuinely weird in ways that reward attention.

Bowman's full piece, linked in his post on X, presumably contains the additional texture that the sourced material here does not. For the complete account of the phone call, the Seinfeld reference in context, and whatever else the hour before first pitch produced, that is the place to go.

The short version, though, is this: Martin Perez was not supposed to start. He started anyway. He reportedly nearly threw a no-hitter. Walt Weiss compared the situation to a television show that ran for nine seasons on the premise that nothing, really, was happening. Baseball, as a sport, continues to justify its own existence.