Perfection Just Ain't What It Used to Be

When you're dancing with the stars it's tough to
compete with perfection.

Is it just me or have others noticed an avalanche of the word "perfect" thundering into everyday public discourse?

We just finished building a house and found ourselves in many conversations with bankers, mortgage officers, and other folks evaluating our credit worthiness. It appears we are perfect in that regard, something even I would dispute.

I guess I first noticed it when being interviewed on the phone regarding our application for a home loan. "For security reasons," she said, "May I have the last four digits of your Social Security number." I provided the information and she responded, "Perfect!"

It took me back. Had I known I was being graded I would have given more thought to my answer. I surely would not have wanted the last four digits of my Social Security number to be less than perfect. I probably would have wanted to consult that flimsy red, white, and blue card they gave me back when I took a job at that godforsaken laundry when I was about 12. I didn't have it on me, but I think I know the box it's in, or at least the room. I could have gone there and found it so as to avoid any chance of being imperfect on those four digits.

But before I could process all of that, my current address was also judged by the banker to be "perfect." Ah ha! Now I had them. That address was on East 30th Terrace Court and sometimes East was shortened to E; Terrace abbreviated as Terr. and sometimes Ter.; often Court was shortened to Ct. And most disconcerting, the Post Office on occasion added an "S" on the end, presumably meaning South. It was a volunteer thing, I guess. I opted out, figuring East and South needed to play together at one end of the address or the other. I wasn't about to contribute to dysfunctional coordinates in my home address.

But here's the thing. The address I recited to this lady over the phone had at least seven or eight possible renderings. I don't know which one she wrote down or compared with what she had on her paper. But I know this for a fact. There's no way more than a handful of answers to the same question can all be "PERFECT." Nonetheless, we got the loan.

A few days ago I was in the dentist chair having my teeth cleaned and otherwise assaulted by a very nice and well-meaning hygienist. Laying there without much else to do I started to ponder the way I might put together this post, which had been bouncing around in my head for a while. "Open a little wider," she said, jamming some kind of telephone pole into my mouth. I did as requested and darned if she didn't reward me with an undeserved "Perfect!"

Undeserved? Well, let's just say there's nothing inside my mouth that's perfect. Trust me. I've seen the x-rays.

A few years ago I saw a movie called A Perfect Storm, which was about a ship that found itself in the midst of a horrendous storm resulting from the unexpected convergence of various climatic conditions. When you look up "perfect storm" you find a variety of definitions such as:

A "perfect storm" is an expression that describes an event where a rare combination of circumstances will aggravate a situation drastically. The term is also used to describe an actual phenomenon that happens to occur in such a confluence, resulting in an event of unusual magnitude.

In other words, a variety of circumstances, many of them undesirable, converge to create something so undesirable that it is called perfect. I don't know. As I recall, the guys on that boat called the storm a lot of things. Perfect wasn't one of them.

I guess what I'm feeling here is that "perfect" seems to be used these days to apply to a whole bucket of things that don't even remotely relate to what we traditionally have understood the term to mean. Perfection is on its way to being cheapened into meaninglessness. A lot of things bother me more than this--war, poverty, hunger, the Yankee payroll--but other people blog on those subjects. I doubt if misusage of the word "perfect" is sticking in anyone else's craw. It should.

Senator George Aiken is usually the one most authoritatively attributed with saying of the Vietnam War that we should "declare victory and come home."

Similarly, it seems that recent usage implies that simply pronouncing something as perfect makes it so. Which, of course, it isn't. So, what to do?

Major League Baseball spring training begins this week (Do I hear an AMEN?). I find that baseball provides answers to most of life's vexing problems, even while posing some perplexing issues of its own. But baseball does have some things to say about perfection.

On October 8, 1956 the New York Yankees played the Brooklyn Dodgers in Game 5 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium. The Yankee pitcher that day was a gangly right-hander named Don Larsen, an improbable centerpiece for the first and only perfect game in World Series history. A journeyman pitcher, he ended his career with a forgettable win/loss record of 81-91. No one would have imagined it, but for one day that October Don Larsen was, in baseball terms, perfect.

The official Major League Baseball (MLB) definition of a perfect game is as follows:

An official perfect game occurs when a pitcher (or pitchers) retires each batter on the opposing team during the entire course of a game, which consists of at least nine innings. In a perfect game, no batter reaches any base during the course of the game.

The rules couldn't be much clearer, but even this search for perfection has its own challenges. Here are a few:

• Many people think the final pitch of the game, a called third strike by Umpire Babe Pinelli (working the last game of a 21 year career), was actually high and should have been called a ball. If a perfect game ends on a blown call is it still perfect?
• Larsen threw 97 pitches to retire 27 batters. The minimum number of pitches possible would be 27, assuming each batter swung at the first pitch and made an out. Would such a scenario be somehow more perfect?
• Almost every game has judgment calls--a close call on a runner at first, a possible trap on a diving play in the outfield, a home run that went fair or foul. Can anything that requires human judgment to declare whether a rule has been met ever be called "perfect?"

Despite these considerations, I still think that baseball has a better claim to its definition of perfection than my loan officer or dental hygienist. At least it has a set of rules against which its claims can be measured.

However, there is one more thing. I was nine years old when Don Larsen pitched his perfect game. I watched it on a small black-and-white television in the living quarters inside my grandmother's neighborhood grocery store in Toronto. Present that day were a handful or two of my relatives, including my usually absent father. Everyone there was a Yankee fan. Except me. For reasons I would understand only later in life (in seminary, where you learn about good and evil), I held my ground for the Dodgers and against the Yankees and in the face of family scorn.

As a result, I would say of Don Larsen what I would confess for myself.

Nobody's perfect.