The Perfect Game

IT WAS CLEAR after only a couple innings on that cold, overcast Tuesday in February that Ryan Rembisz ’25 was pitching well. By the seventh inning, the Seattle U Redhawks hadn’t had a hit and another thing became clear: a perfect game was still in play.

The possibility of perfection turns the average baseball watcher from excited to anxious. Everyone gets quieter—from the dugout to the press box. Perfect games are one of the miracles of baseball, an event so rare that only 20 of them had happened in all of college baseball. And none of them at UP.

In the press box, no one wanted to jinx it by saying it out loud. The PA announcer, Kerry Kirwan, asked if we were really watching “The PG Word.” Vice President of Athletics Scott Leykam asked if “it” would be a program first. Bryan Sleik, play-by-play for almost all Pilot sports, used every imaginable euphemism on air, running out to ask the rest of us if we’d had one before, letting us infer what he meant by “one.”

Everyone seemed nervous. Everyone, that is, but Rembisz. He was laughing with his teammates in the dugout, apparently unbothered by the pressure. It was his first start of the year, in a make-up game that had originally meant to be played in Seattle. After it’d been cancelled, the teams then scrambled to make it happen in Portland, and instead of being just another midweek college baseball game lost among all other Tuesday games, it turned into one of the best pitching performances in the sport’s history.

“It was just so random,” Rembisz said. “I was just like, ‘Oh man, we’re through six clean, we’re through seven clean, we’re through eight clean, this is hilarious.’ ”

By the final inning, Rembisz had entered a flow state. The only thoughts going through his mind on the mound were: Don’t think. Turn off all the noise.

“It’s just like a peace of mind where you’re very content,” he said. “Suddenly you’re just a guy doing a job out there.”

His last pitch was hit to third, where Cole Katayama-Stall ’28 fielded an awkward grounder and made the throw to first. Time seemed to slow as the ball traveled through the air. Zach Toglia ’25 at first made the catch and the whole stadium exhaled. It was a baseball miracle. Ryan Rembisz had thrown the 21st perfect game in college baseball history.

Rembisz estimates he got over 100 texts from friends and family after making history. He had around 130 DMs on Instagram. A litany of interviews followed, from Baseball America to the Portland Tribune. Major League Baseball’s official Instagram account posted about it and got 105,000 likes. The college baseball world was in awe of Rembisz’s performance—a perfect game is rare enough, but to strike out 12 batters on just 90 pitches is even more miraculous.

This is the last year of Rembisz’s career. He spent the first three years at UP as a perfectly fine long relief pitcher, a rubber arm that can eat a few innings when needed. On that Tuesday, all he had to do was just that. Instead, he put together not just the best pitching performance in Pilot history, but one of the best ever in college baseball.

The feelings of absurdity that Rembisz felt and the anxiety shared by everyone else will be left behind from that day. But the perfection he achieved now lasts forever.

KYLE GARCIA ’20 is University of Portland’s Assistant Athletic Director, Communications.