Last week Phillip Humber became the 21st pitcher to pitch a perfect game in major league baseball. Right now as I write this, he has been ousted from his next start after allowing 9 earned runs in five innings. This got me wondering how other pitchers have performed in their next start after their perfect game. Obviously, thing have to get worse in the next start, but things seem to get much worse. Using baseball-reference.com, I looked up game logs for the next start after the perfect game.

Here are the results (in a google doc).

For the 17 games I could find box scores for, including Humber’s next start, these pitchers have a combined record of 5-8 (originally said 4-9) with 4 no decisions, an ERA of 5.67 and a WHIP of 1.466. That’s certainly not perfect.  Terrible might be a better word for it.  I guess it’s hard to even be average once you’ve experienced perfection.

Cheers.