Baseball alone gives this to you. Only baseball allows this to happen. Baseball is where a pitcher named Domingo German can allow 15 earned runs in his last two starts — 15 earned runs across 5 ¹/₃ innings — and then stride to a pitcher’s mound in Oakland, Calif., six days later three outs away from perfection.

Three outs away from forever.

“I felt an amount of pressure I’ve never felt before,” German admitted to YES Network’s Meredith Marakovits on the other side of the bottom of the ninth Wednesday night.

It was impossible to tell. That’s the remarkable part. German was at 93 pitches to start the inning. He had an 11-0 lead. He had faced 24 Athletics and had retired them all, and he had really only needed to be bailed out once, on a nice diving play by Anthony Rizzo with one out in the fifth. If his heart was pounding, if his brain was racing, he had a sweet serenity swimming on his face.

He got to 1-and-2 on Aledmys Diaz. Diaz pounded the ball on the ground to Anthony Volpe at short. That was out No. 25. German’s expression never changed. Behind the plate, Kyle Higashioka began to feel the same way as German, feeling the stress, maybe feeling history starting to creep onto the field alongside him.

“I took a few extra seconds to push the buttons on those pitches [in the ninth],” Higashioka told Marakovits, referring to his PitchCom device. “I didn’t want to mess it up.”

German was at 97 pitches now. Up stepped Oakland catcher Shea Langeliers. German zipped a curveball — easily the best pitch in his repertoire all night — and Langeliers popped it high in the air. German pointed to it as if Harrison Bader in center field and the other 47 players and the 12,479 people dotting the cavernous Oakland Coliseum could miss it as it traced an easy path across the black California sky. Harrison Bader squeezed it in his glove. Two outs.

Up stepped Esteury Ruiz.

They have been playing professional baseball since 1869, and only 23 men had ever gone 27-up, 27-down, before Wednesday, and none since the great Felix Hernandez in 2012. The Yankees have been in business since 1901. Three men in those 123 seasons had thrown perfectos:

Don Larsen against the Dodgers in the 1956 World Series.

David Wells against the Twins in May 1998.

David Cone against the Expos in July 1999.

Now here was another kid with a “D” leading off his name, one out from forever, one out from joining that forever crew, in his own way every bit as unlikely a potential member as the first one was. Larsen was mostly known as a journeyman and a prince of the night in his time as a ballplayer, and he famously enjoyed himself thoroughly on the eve of his gem. He was 81-91 for his career. But he will be remembered as long as baseball is played for one day when he was untouchable.

Perfection has its privileges.

German? He has shown flashes of brilliance all across a six-year career. He has battled his own issues: a domestic-violence suspension in 2019, a 10-game suspension for a sticky substance earlier this year. And his last two starts, against the Red Sox and Mariners, sure felt like a plea to be removed from the rotation.

He was at 98 pitches now.

“Don’t overthrow,” he said he reminded himself, advice that had served him well with two outs in the eighth, when he fell behind Jonah Bride 3-and-1, one stray pitch away from losing his immaculate line. He answered with three beautiful curves, all for strikes, the last a diver that Bride grounded harmlessly to third.

“I wanted to keep focused,” German said. “I wanted to stay balanced.”

His face was passive. His heart was bursting. A day before, he had spent much of the day crying, mourning an uncle who had passed earlier in the week. Now he stared blankly at Higashioka, who took his extra beat before pressing his PitchCom button.

Curveball, of course.

And it was perfect, of course, carving toward the outside corner. Ruiz took a mighty hack, but barely nudged it toward third. Josh Donaldson fielded it cleanly, threw it straight as a string. And on his 99th pitch of the night, German had joined the pantheon of perfection.

“It was so much fun to watch him do that,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “Watching him paint a masterpiece.”

Baseball, you know? Only in baseball.