A legend of this newspaper, and of this business, involves the day that Don Larsen pitched his perfect game for the Yankees in the World Series, the first perfect game a Yankee had ever pitched, still the only one a World Series had ever seen.

Joe Trimble was writing the game story for the Daily News on that October day in 1956. Dick Young was sitting next to him. When it was over, after Larsen had struck out Dale Mitchell and Yogi had jumped into Larsen’s arms, Joe was still searching for the right way to begin what felt like the biggest game story he would ever have to write for this newspaper.

That was when, or so the legend has it, Young leaned over and said, “The imperfect man pitched a perfect game.” Joe Trimble wrote it, the most famous line that would ever appear under his byline.

Now another imperfect young man, Domingo German, has pitched another perfect game for the Yankees, against the Oakland Double A’s on Wednesday night, the fourth in the team’s history and the first to occur somewhere other than Yankee Stadium, old or new.

Don Larsen, who passed away three years ago at the age of 90, was a journeyman when he shut down the Brooklyn Dodgers that day in ‘56, one with a reputation for late nights and sometimes very early mornings in the big city. It was Mickey Mantle — and please consider the source on this one — who once said this of Don Larsen:

“He had a startling capacity for liquor.”

That is why Dick Young and Joe Trimble called him imperfect that day. Boomer Wells, in his day, was no lead singer in the choir himself when he pitched his own perfect game as Yankee. But it is different with German. It just is.

He is the young man who nearly four years ago lost half-a-season of his baseball life because of a suspension for violating his sport’s Joint Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Policy. As far as we know, the only thing Don Larsen liked to hit was the bars.

Earlier this month, German got himself suspended again, for 10 games this time, when his pitching hand was considered too sticky and he was ejected from the game he was pitching for having a foreign substance on that hand. Just in the context of Yankee perfect games, German is the one who holds the record for suspensions.

But now he has pitched one of the two-dozen perfect games in the history of his sport. Now he is permanently part of Yankee history with Larsen, Wells, David Cone. Sometimes and somehow, even when there is a lot of chatter about how the Yankees have looked this season and how they have played, especially with Aaron Judge out of the lineup, something like this can still happen with this team. Out of nowhere, someone can come along and Yankee things up all over again.

Look at the way Judge Yankeed things up last season, hitting all those home runs over the second half, finally catching Babe Ruth and catching Roger Maris and then passing Maris when he hit No. 62. The big guy became so much a big moment, not just with the Yankees but in American sports, that people almost started to forget – but not quite — that a Yankee team that had started 64-28 was nothing more than a .500 mediocrity after that.

So it came to be in Oakland on Wednesday night, on what might turn out to be one of the worst teams in the history of major league baseball, that a skinny starting pitcher from the Dominican changed the subject on the way the Yankees haven’t been hitting to the perfect game that he just pitched against the A’s.

German didn’t change his own history in the process. It doesn’t work that way. His 81-game suspension will always be part of his record the way 27 up and 27 down will be, the way the 10-game suspension will be (and after German had already been warned once). But perhaps German can go from here, and this kind of magic night at that old baseball dump in Oakland, to have the kind of career, and in pinstripes, that his talent would seem to warrant. He does have a world of talent. People around the Yankees still talk about how much they could have used him in October of 2019 against the Astros, if he wasn’t gone from the season in September.

German said this in spring training in 2021:

“I have to show that I definitely can become a better person and let my actions speak for myself.”

He did that as a ballplayer on Wednesday night in Oakland. He did what Cone last did for the Yankees, on Yogi Berra Day in July of 1999, with Don Larsen in attendance, of course. You can’t have much more of a Yankee day than that. This time it was German doing what Cone and the others before him did, a long way from the Stadium, and a long way from New York.

Fourth Yankee pitcher to do it. Now we see what Domingo German continues to do with his own second chance from here. Not the first imperfect man to do something great in baseball in New York. Just the latest.

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