Roy Oswalt was one out from perfection.Standing between the Houston Astros starter, a perfect game and a celebratory dogpile was Boston Red Sox pinch hitter Doug Mirabelli. Oswalt peered down the pitcher’s mound and aimed a first-pitch fastball high and inside. He misfired badly, and everyone knew it. The pitch caught too much of the plate. Mirabelli hit a history-busting base knock.Alongside the pantheon of Major League Baseball pitchers who have authored a perfect game is an assortment of others with close brushes that lodged in the sport’s collective consciousness: Armando Galarraga’s imperfect game. Max Scherzer and Milt Pappas, one strike away.This was the Mirabelli meatball. If you haven’t heard of it, you must not have spent the past two weeks captivated by one man’s mission to livestream the video game “MVP Baseball 2005” until he threw a perfect game with Oswalt. Mirabelli’s single spoiled attempt No. 1,421.Jay Lucarelli, 31, sat with his MacBook at the kitchen table in his mother’s home in Jackson Township, Ohio, pounding fastballs and energy drinks. He lost perfect-game bids everywhere from the first pitch to the last out. His madcap operation went viral.“It’s hard to describe how meaningful a meaningless challenge like this felt in the moment,” Lucarelli said in a phone call Monday. As for why he had done it all, Lucarelli offered a simple explanation: “Some people like to knit. Some people like to throw perfect games with Roy Oswalt.”The question most viewers had was: Why Roy Oswalt?Even the man himself.Last Friday, Oswalt was clearing a plot of land in central Mississippi where his oldest daughter and her husband plan to build a house when a reporter from his Houston days reached out about the perfect-game challenge. Bewildered, Oswalt logged into his X account. “I saw someone say, ‘Roy Oswalt is trending and doesn’t even know it,’” Oswalt said, laughing, during a phone interview conducted from the cab of a yellow Caterpillar bulldozer Wednesday morning. “I was like, yeah, I don’t get on here very much.”As Lucarelli closed in on 2,000 tries over the weekend, Oswalt ran the math in his head. All of those innings might get him to Cy Young’s MLB record for innings pitched. “That would be an extra feather in my hat,” Oswalt joked. “We’ve got to call the commissioner and see if we can add those stats.”“MVP Baseball 2005” came out when Oswalt was one of the top arms in the National League and Lucarelli was 10 and living in Cleveland. In the years since, Lucarelli periodically returned to the game to relive the sight of CC Sabathia — a lefty like Lucarelli — pitching for the Cleveland Indians at Jacobs Field. Earlier this month, Lucarelli fired up the game on his laptop and streamed for a while on his new TikTok Live account. No viewers showed up. There were no stakes. So, Lucarelli manufactured some.Perfect game or bust.Lucarelli wanted a starter capable of throwing a perfect game yet mortal enough to make him work for it. Sabathia had too much of an edge as a southpaw. Picking an all-timer like Randy Johnson, Lucarelli said, “I might have gotten it done in 100 attempts and we’re never doing this interview.”Lucarelli landed on Oswalt, a right-hander who’d become one of his favorite pitchers when he was carving up the St. Louis Cardinals in the 2005 NLCS.On attempt No. 67, Oswalt carried a perfect game into the seventh inning against the Cardinals before Albert Pujols parked a full-count, two-out heater into Houston’s Crawford Boxes. The crack of the bat sounded like revenge. As the distance tracker on the homer climbed, Lucarelli hurriedly retreated to the main menu and restarted the game.Screenshot: jay.lucarellisports on TikTokOswalt has never played “MVP Baseball 2005.”He did, however, play some great baseball in 2005. He won 20 games, had a 2.94 ERA over 237 innings and finished top-five NL Cy Young finisher alongside teammates Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte.“It was an unbelievable season,” Oswalt said.Before Game 6 of the 2005 NLCS, then-Astros owner Drayton McLane stopped by Oswalt’s locker with a promise: If Oswalt won, sending Houston to its first World Series, McLane would buy him a bulldozer they had talked about. Oswalt tossed seven innings of one-run ball to beat the Cardinals. McLane had a $200,000 Caterpillar D6N XL, adorned with an Astros logo and a giant red bow, delivered on a flatbed truck to Minute Maid Park.That bulldozer still gets regular use in Missouri, where Oswalt has a 1,000-acre farm. He’s got a second, smaller bulldozer in Mississippi, where he has a restaurant and spends most of his time these days.