Ángel Macías, a dazzling, ambidextrous 12-year-old pitcher from Mexico who threw a perfect game in the 1957 Little League World Series to win the championship, a feat no other player has repeated, died on July 27 in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico. He was 80.
Little League International announced the death.
Playing for a factory-sponsored team from Monterrey, the 12-year-old Macías (pronounced ma-SEE-yas) was the tournament’s unicorn. He could pitch with either arm and was a switch-hitter. He played first base as a left-hander and the rest of the infield (and outfield) as a right-hander.
He also threw one-hitters in two of the regulation six-inning games that the Monterrey Industrial Little League team won in district, state and regional tournaments to qualify for the World Series. In another game, he struck out 15 batters.
“There is a 12-year-old Mexican baseball player whose name is Angel but who is a diamond devil to his opponents,” The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Ky., wrote before Macías’s team played a regional game in that city. “Some jest that Angel Macías of Monterrey must, indeed, be bewitched.”
His manager, César Faz, told the newspaper: “He’s quite a good pitcher — our best. As a matter of fact, he is the best boy we have at every position.”
Despite rumors that he might pitch left-handed in the final game of the World Series, the 5-foot-3, 88-pound Macías faced a team of much bigger boys from La Mesa, Calif., as a right-hander.
He dominated them, allowing no base runners in a 4-0 victory. He struck out 11 players, including the last three. The seven other hitters grounded out.
“We could have been seated there for all the game because no one got a fly ball,” Jose Maiz, an outfielder and pitcher for Monterrey, said in a video on the Little League website. In 2023, he told the M.L.B. website that Macías “had a very good fastball and a very good 12-6 curve. We called it ‘The Drop.’”
Bob Considine, a syndicated sports columnist, wrote that Macías had shown “the grace of a matador and the pitching savvy of a Don Larsen” — who had pitched a perfect game for the Yankees in the previous October’s World Series.
There have been six other perfect games in the Little League World Series, but Macías’s was the only one thrown in a championship game.
A few days after winning the title, the Monterrey team traveled to Washington, where the players met President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In a photograph and a newsreel taken on the grounds of the White House, Macías showed the championship trophy to the president. On a tour of the Capitol, he placed his uniform cap on the head of Lyndon B. Johnson, the Senate majority leader.
Back home in Monterrey, the team was honored with a parade attended by thousands of fans.
Ángel Macías Barba was born on Sept. 2, 1944, in Aguascalientes, Mexico, to Juanita Barba and Anacieto Macías. He was among the 11- and 12-year-olds who joined the Monterrey Industrial Little League team on what would be a nearly monthlong journey, which ended in Williamsport, Pa., the home of the league, where the World Series games take place.
Monterrey’s title was the first for an international team in the Little League World Series. Monterrey won the title again the next year.
In the aftermath of the perfect game, Les Biederman, a sports columnist at The Pittsburgh Press, wrote, “You know, a funny thing, one man in baseball said, if the Pirates did sign the 12-year-old, he could play right away and help the gate.”
Macías’s pitching feat was the subject of a feature film, “The Perfect Game” (2009), with Jake T. Austin as Macías.
Macías continued to play baseball into adulthood. In 1962, he signed a major league contract with the Los Angeles Angels. He played two seasons in the lower minor leagues of the Angels’ system as an outfielder, not as a pitcher. He told The New York Times in 1957 that his favorite player was Mickey Mantle, the Yankees’ slugging center fielder and fellow switch hitter — or, as he phrased it though an interpreter, a “turnover hitter like me.”
He then spent the next decade playing for teams in Mexico.
His survivors include his wife, Josefina Martínez, and three daughters, Josefina Macías-Martínez, Marta Patricia Macías-Martínez and Diana Laura Macías-Martínez, as well as five grandsons and two granddaughters and two great-grandsons.
After his playing days, Macías worked as the director of human resources at a textile company. But he remained involved in baseball in various capacities, including as an international adviser to the Little Leagues of Mexico.
In 2017, he was inducted into the Little League Hall of Excellence.
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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