One, two, three.
One, two, three.
Like a man flipping through radio stations and finding the same song on every one, the Phillies kept going down. Quietly. Quickly. Monotonously. Until suddenly, perfection was in the air at Veterans Stadium.
On July 4th, 1989, with the stadium organ howling and the crowd of 14,636 on its feet, Tom Browning stood three outs from becoming the first pitcher in baseball history to throw two perfect games. Exactly 293 days earlier, he had been flawless against the Dodgers. Now, on Independence Day, he was ready to light up the sky again.
Then came Dickie Thon.
Down in the count, tight in the box, Thon reached out and served a Browning fastball into the right-center field gap. Eric Davis chased. Paul O’Neill chased. Geometry played tricks with your eyes. But the ball fell. The perfect game was gone. The no-hitter was gone. All that remained was the roar.
“I didn’t even think I had good stuff,” Browning said afterward, via the Philadelphia Daily News. “And having done it once, to get this close again is kind of mind-boggling.”
Thon, meanwhile, knew the weight of the moment.
“There’s pressure on me, sure,” he said. “But he’s got pressure too. He’s three outs away from history. He has to throw strikes. I was just looking for something I could hit hard.”
That one swing was nearly enough to derail the Reds. But after a groundout and an RBI fielder’s choice, closer John Franco induced a chopper to short from Lenny Dykstra. Ballgame: Reds 2, Phillies 1.
Lost in the Browning buzz? Terry Mulholland, who tossed a complete game of his own and might have deserved better.
Mulholland gave up two in the first — and probably shouldn’t have allowed more than one. A walk to Lenny Harris, a Kal Daniels double, and then a muffed cutoff led to the first run. Daniels advanced to third, and eventually scored on a slow-developing fielder’s choice after first baseman Ricky Jordan hesitated.
“We didn’t execute,” said manager Nick Leyva. “And it might’ve cost us the game.”
It was that kind of night. Mulholland kept the Reds quiet after the first, but with Browning pitching like he had dinner plans with history, it hardly mattered.
The Phillies didn’t exactly go quietly — Dykstra lined out hard in the fourth, smoked another pitch up the middle in the seventh that Browning snagged in self-defense, and Randy Ready sent a rope to center in the eighth. But every ball seemed magnetized to a Reds glove.
“We tried everything,” Leyva said. “We tried stepping out. Then we tried swinging early. But he just kept coming.”
So the Phillies were swept away in waves of "one, two, three" — 24 times in a row. Until Thon broke the silence. Until the magic faded.
And Tom Browning walked off the mound, still just one perfect game short of immortality.
(Credit for all quotes contained within this story go to Paul Hagen and the Philadelphia Daily News.)
