Have you heard enough about Mark Buehrle’s feats of perfection? (Nah, probably not.) The perfect game, 5.2 perfect innings in his next start, 45 batters in a row retired?  Amazing stuff, but here’s something new.

Back on May 7, all but forgotten now, Mark Buehrle threw 6.1 perfect innings against the Tigers before yielding a double to Placido Polanco.  That makes three starts of at least five perfect innings in the same season.  A five-inning perfect start is a significant achievement -- on average, only about 1 in every 300 starts reaches this milestone, or about once every ten years for the average pitcher.  Many pitchers go a whole career without ever taking a perfect game into the sixth inning.  So three in one season, well, that’s some serious hurling.  Has anyone else ever accomplished that?

It turns out that since 1953 (the Retrosheet era, for which we have play-by-play data), only four other pitchers have flirted with perfection, here defined as a start of 5+ perfect innings, three times in the same season. 

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