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Perfect game: 'I deserved this,' Felix Hernandez says
By John Hickey, Special for USA TODAY
2012/8/16SEATTLE – You can always tell a Felix Hernandez start at Safeco Field.
A crowd of several hundred, sometimes more, gathers in the left-field corner with one goal in mind — rooting home King Felix, the ace of the Seattle Mariners rotation. They wear yellow "King's Court" T-shirts, screech for strikeouts and bellow when he gets one.
So at that level, Wednesday's game was no different from many other games with Hernandez pitching at home for the Mariners. But as the innings stretched on and the outs piled up, it became apparent that this was going to be a special day, even for the high standards of the 2010 Cy Young Award winner.
MORE: 'King Felix' dominant in sixth no-hitter of season
By day's end, Hernandez had moved into the rarefied air of the perfect game club, retiring all 27 batters he faced to write the 23rd chapter of the perfect game monologues.
When it was all over, when he threw a 92-mph changeup to freeze Sean Rodriguez for his 12th strikeout and 27th out, Hernandez hurled both arms toward the sky, then waited as he was swarmed by his teammates, 1-0 winners against the Tampa Bay Rays.
"This is an awesome feeling,'' Hernandez said. "The fans deserved this. I deserved this."
Then he started laughing. He knew how much of a brag it sounded. But Hernandez isn't the bragging type. He's in the midst of his seventh full season with the Mariners, and things haven't always been fair.
Seattle doesn't score much, so even in his Cy Young Award year of 2010, he won 13 games. The Mariners haven't been to the playoffs since the year that Hernandez signed as a 16-year-old out of Venezuela in 2002.
There have been a lot of tough days in Seattle for Hernandez. This makes up for many of those.
Things were going so badly for the Rays, flailing all over the place at Hernandez's pitches, that manager Joe Maddon made it a point to come out of the dugout in the seventh inning, arguing on a pitch that was outside. One night earlier, Maddon had talked about how you can't judge whether a pitch is inside or outside from the bench.
But when your hitters are being made to look foolish, Maddon played a hunch that maybe a disruption would throw Hernandez off his game. No such luck.
"No, it didn't bother me," Hernandez said. "I just focused on my game."
And that, in addition to immense talent, is what makes Hernandez special.
"Felix knows the game and he respects the game," Seattle manager Eric Wedge said. "He's our leader. To get 27 outs like that, you need a little bit of luck. But he also has the intangibles that separate him from the rest. That's the kind of teammate he is."Two starts earlier, against the New York Yankees, Hernandez had the best stuff that Wedge said he'd ever seen. Wednesday's game one-upped that.
"Into the ninth inning, he's throwing 95 mph and he's throwing secondary pitches for strikes in a 2-0 count (against No. 9 hitter Sean Rodriguez)," Wedge said. "He's as consistent as any starting pitcher could be."
If there was any downside to the day for Hernandez, it was that his wife and kids had chosen this week to fly down to Venezuela to visit family, so they weren't at the game.
"I'm a little sad that my wife and kids weren't here," Hernandez said. "But it was awesome. And it was awesome to do it here (Safeco Field). The fans deserve this."
Catcher John Jaso, who also caught the game against the Yankees (a two-hit shutout Aug. 4 at Yankee Stadium) said, "I had the easy part. I just sat back there and caught it. Everything Felix threw today worked. Everything."
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