Of course, it could never happen.

A pitcher on a mediocre team, at the end of a great career, 40 years old and sore-armed, thrown in to pitch against the mighty Yankees on the next to last day of the season.

He knows that it probably will be the last time he ever pitches in the major leagues. So of course he pitches a perfect game.

Few things are more rare in baseball history. Only 20 perfect games have been pitched in major league history, from Lee Richmond for Worcester back in 1880 to Roy Halladay for the Phillies in 2010. So if it were to happen under the circumstances described earlier, you would have to figure it would be a movie.

http://youtu.be/WLrqdqBfqcw

Kevin Costner's<a title="For Love of the Game" href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126916/"> "For Love of the Game"</a> is probably the most lightly regarded of his three wonderful baseball movies, but that says more about how wonderful the other two -- "Bull Durham" and "Field of Dreams" -- are than anything else. It's the only one of the three in which the protagonist is a big league ballplayer. Pitcher Billy Chapel is not just a big leaguer, he's one who has already punched his ticket for the Hall of Fame.

But he's at the end of the line in a game he has played since he was 8 years old, and what comes after baseball is very much up for grabs. The story of the game is intertwined with the story of a five-year, on-off love affair with Jane Aubrey, well played by Kelly Preston. Jane is leaving for a job in London, and she is watching the game in an airport lounge. Her daughter Heather, played by Jena Malone, is watching from her dorm room at college. Heather and Jane represent the family Billy might have had, and their reactions during the game -- particularly at the end -- are some of the best moments.

[caption id="attachment_1407" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Jena Malone in &quot;For Love of the Game&quot;"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/For-Love-of-the-Game-jena-malone-212219_775_335.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1407" title="For-Love-of-the-Game-jena-malone-212219_775_335" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/For-Love-of-the-Game-jena-malone-212219_775_335-300x129.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="129" /></a>[/caption]

It's a movie with two endings, the first to resolve the game and the second to resolve the relationship, and if the first matters the most, it says something about the hold baseball has on the people who love it.

I said earlier that there have been only 20 perfect games in baseball history, and the irony of it is that I missed covering one of them by taking a day off in 1991. I was covering the Dodgers, and I had been amassing a lot of overtime. My boss made me take the last weekend of July off, and on Sunday, Dennis Martinez of the Montreal Expos pitched a perfect game.

Of course that could never happen.

But it did.

In baseball, absolutely anything can happen -- and often does.

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