Verlander Continues to Seek Perfection April 7, 2012, 5:43 pm Here is a sign of how dominant Detroit's Justin Verlander was last season: throwing only one no-hitter left him disappointed. "I feel like I should have done it two more times," Verlander said, mentioning two bids he lost in the eighth inning. Verlander has also never thrown a perfect game, although he saw his former teammate Armando Galarraga nearly do it in 2010, only to lose the distinction when the umpire Jim Joyce blew a call on what should have been the final out. "It's very elusive," Verlander said. But that's what makes it so tough. Everything has to be perfect, and it's not just you: your teammates have to be perfect, the umpire has to be perfect. The stars have to align. It should be hard to accomplish; that's why only 20 pitchers have done it. Galarraga pitched poorly for Arizona last season and could not crack Baltimore's staff this spring. Oakland's Dallas Braden, who pitched a perfect game about a month before Galarraga's nearly did, had shoulder surgery after three starts last season. He recently had a setback in his recovery and received an injection of platelet-rich plasma Tuesday. Verlander has been talking about perfect games lately as a spokesman for the video game "MLB 2K12." He appears in a TV commercial dressed as Randy Johnson, trying to sneak into a club for perfect pitchers until Kate Upton, a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, stops him. Players who pitch a virtual perfect game this month could be eligible to win $1 million in a tournament in May in New York. But beware of using Verlander against, say, the Houston Astros. The company is rating the perfect games based on degree of difficulty. "Pitching me against the worst offense in the game won't rank as high as pitching someone else against the best offense in the game," Verlander said. They're looking for the most-perfect games, if you could say that.