Three perfect games this season alone. And yeah, the numbers seem to be up. Really good article at Grantland about it. Here ya go...

[SIZE=4]27 Perfect Things About Felix Hernandez’s Perfect Game[/SIZE]By Jonah Keri on August 16, 2012 5:16 PM ET

There are so many angles we can take to describe and explain Felix Hernandez's mastery of the Tampa Bay Rays during Wednesday's start, one that produced the 23rd perfect game in Major League Baseball history. Rather than neglecting salient points, let's try to cover a bunch — 27 of them, one for each out that King Felix recorded in his masterpiece.

27. Inside Edge delivered a terrific infographic showing pitch location and pitch type for all 27 batters that Felix faced. The way he mixed pitches all day was masterful. Check out his inside-outside, high-low sequence to Evan Longoria in the second inning. Or how he handled Carlos Pena in the fifth. You can count the number of mistakes Felix made in the game on one hand. You could argue that the most hittable pitch he threw was a high fastball on a 2-1 count to Sam Fuld, the first batter of the game. Fuld smoked the ball, but Eric Thames made a great running catch. Felix cruised from there.

26. Was this the best-pitched game of all time? By Bill James's Game Score stat, it was not. Game Score is calculated as follows:

Start with 50 points.
Add one point for each out recorded, so three points for every complete inning pitched.
Add two points for each inning completed after the fourth.
Add one point for each strikeout.
Subtract two points for each hit allowed.
Subtract four points for each earned run allowed.
Subtract two points for each unearned run allowed.
Subtract one point for each walk.
Felix scored a 99 for his 12-strikeout perfecto. Matt Cain scored a 101 for his perfect game in June. The highest score of all time actually belongs to Kerry Wood, and it wasn't for a perfect game, or even a no-hitter. Wood's 20-strikeout, one-hit effort against the Astros in 1998 scored a 105.

Game Score and most other metrics don't consider quality of competition, by the way. That '98 Astros team was loaded, with Craig Biggio, Jeff Bagwell, and Moises Alou leading the offense, during one of the friendliest periods of all time for hitters. Still tough to beat Don Larsen, though. Larsen threw his perfecto in the high-offense 1950s, back in the days when the best team in each league made the World Series and underdogs couldn't sneak in via short-series upsets. The higher stakes don't hurt his cause, either. (This post by Dave Cameron comparing the six most recent perfect games in detail is well worth the read, by the way.)

25. What's up with all these perfect games, anyway? There have been 23 in MLB history; six of those have come in the past three years. The number of no-hitters has spiked sharply in recent years, too. So what gives?

The increased number of strikeouts in baseball might have something to do with it. Barring the very rare occurrence of a passed third strike, ringing up three strikes is a pretty reliable way to secure an out. When a batter puts the ball in play, the pitcher suddenly must pray that multiple outside factors — defense, luck, field conditions, wind, the alignment of the planets — don't result in a hit. Pitchers have recorded the highest strikeout rate of all time this season, 7.5 Ks per nine innings. The past four seasons also mark the only four times league strikeout rates have exceeded 7 Ks per nine innings: 7.0 in 2009, 7.1 in 2010, 7.1 in 2011, and 7.5 in 2012. Strikeout-to-walk rate is also at its highest point ever this year, at better than 2.4 K/BB.

Of course this is just one possible explanation, and it's a flawed one. Relief pitchers have accounted for a big chunk of the spike in K and K/BB rates (hey there, Aroldis Chapman and Craig Kimbrel!). Few no-hitters, and zero perfect games, have included contributions from relief pitchers. There are likely a whole stack of subtle reasons that can help explain the recent surge in flawless pitching. We just don't have all those answers yet.

24. Grantland colleague Bill Barnwell ran the numbers to see what the odds were that we'd have three perfect games already occur this season, based on historical rates of perfect games (and not considering any other factors). The result? About 1,294-to-1.

23. OK, then what's up with the Rays getting no-hit/perfecto'd so often? Of the past 16 no-hitters/perfect games thrown, the Rays have been involved in five of them, victimized four times (Matt Garza threw a no-no for Tampa Bay in 2010). The Rays do strike out a lot: They're fourth in the majors this season, striking out 21.4 percent of the time. They were 11th in 2011 (19.4 percent), third in 2010 (20.6 percent), fourth in 2009 (19.7 percent), and fifth in 2008 (19.4 percent). Of course these were also all seasons in which they either made the playoffs or were competitive until late in the year, with decent to very good offenses each year, except this year. They've also seen most of those performances come in pitcher-friendly parks: Felix at Safeco, Dallas Braden on Mother's Day 2010 in Oakland (dare you not to cry when he hugs his grandmother at the end of this clip), Edwin Jackson in 2010 at home in Tropicana Field.

But again, there are surely a bunch of factors that aren't obvious here, including random chance.

22. As SB Nation's Rob Neyer notes, only the Rays and Dodgers have had three perfect games thrown against them. The Dodgers are a century older.

21. Wednesday's Rays lineup was particularly vulnerable to a big pitching performance. This DRaysBay post covers the lineup Tampa Bay trotted out Wednesday against Felix. The Rays were already struggling offensively this season, and they benched Jeff Keppinger (hitting .319 with a .372 on-base percentage as one of the most pleasant surprises in baseball) and Desmond Jennings (weak numbers this year, but .344/.394/.541 in his past 67 plate appearances heading into Wednesday's game). Of course, even with Felix pitching and a diminished lineup, this was still a special accomplishment. The DRaysBay analysis pegs the chances of Felix throwing a perfect game against that lineup at four-thousandths of 1 percent — vs. three-thousandths of 1 percent if you assume league-average on-base percentage (.320) against an average pitcher in average conditions.

20. These were not average conditions. We've mentioned Safeco Field, which has played as a pitcher's paradise for as long as it's existed, and as the worst park for overall offense this season (.661 park factor — 1.000 is average) as well the worst park for hits this season, by far (.750 park factor).

But the study I'd like to see done (and which I once tried, and failed, to complete) is an in-depth look at the possible effects of getaway day. Anecdotally, it seems that umpires bungle ball-and-strike calls even more than usual in the final game of a series and everyone's got a plane to catch, calling more liberal strike zones. It's possible that some hitters might mentally already have one foot out of the ballpark, too, such that their performance suffers (though you'd have to account for pitcher performance too). Felix got the benefit of several horrible strike calls Wednesday — though having watched most of the entire three-game series, I can tell you that both teams' pitchers were getting generous strike calls on pitches well outside, all three days. At any rate, at some point some enterprising analyst will break down team performances on getaway day vs. every other day. It's possible that Felix got a getaway-day assist for his perfecto.

19. Back to Safeco for a minute. This marked just the second time in MLB history that three no-hitters were thrown at one park in one season, joining Sportsman’s Park in 1917.