This was 10 years ago, and the voice on the other end of the telephone sounded gruff and weary. As many often do when a stranger calls, he asked, “How did you get this number?”

That’s always a tricky one to answer. You never know if you’re spoiling a confidence. But before I could worry about that, the voice softened and strengthened and a loud laugh landscaped by so many New York nights out of the past took over.

“I’m kidding. I’m glad you called,” Don Larsen said. “I was 81-91 as a major league pitcher. If that’s all people knew about me, nobody would ever call.”

A pause.

“You want to talk about my year with the Orioles, right?”

More laughter. He was 3-21 with the Orioles in 1954, when he walked 88 hitters and struck out only 80. There are a lot of ironies involved when you talk about Don Larsen, who died at 90 on New Year’s Day. He was not cut out of classic Yankees cloth. His Yankees battery mate, Yogi Berra, subsisted on a chocolate drink called Yoo-Hoo; Larsen was partial to stronger concoctions.


And he was wild. Man, was he wild. He came to the Yankees in an epic 17-player deal on Nov. 17, 1954, and he would drive his new manager, Casey Stengel, half-crazy with his inability to throw strikes on a regular basis. His best year as a Yankee, 1956, he went 11-5 with a 3.26 ERA but still walked 96. He adopted a no-windup delivery. That helped some.

Still, in Game 2 of the 1956 World Series, he faced 10 batters and walked four of them; given a 6-0 lead, he recorded only five outs. The Dodgers stormed back for a 13-8 win. Years later, Larsen said, “I was so bad that if I were managing me, I wouldn’t have handed me the ball again under any circumstance.”


Yogi Berra leaps into the arms of pitcher Don Larsen after Larsen pitched his perfect game in the 1956 World Series.AP
Such was Larsen’s belief that he went out on the town the night before Game 5. It was through bleary eyes he discovered the next morning that Stengel had put a baseball in his spikes. It was his game.

That day — Oct. 8, 1956 — would instantly become one of the most sacred dates in baseball history. Larsen threw 97 pitches. The last one, a 1-and-2 fastball to Dale Mitchell, was waved at for strike three and that was it: 27 Dodgers up, 27 Dodgers down.

Larsen had pitched just the fourth perfect game in the 20th century, the first in 34 years, the first (and still only) ever thrown in the postseason.

Irony?

Dick Young, the most influential sportswriter New York City has ever known, whose later work appeared in The Post, was scrambling on deadline at his then-newspaper to finish two stories, one from the Dodgers clubhouse, one on Babe Pinelli, the home-plate umpire who was retiring so this was his last game.

Young’s colleague, Joe Trimble, was ashen-faced. The page in his typewriter was blank. He had a terribly timed case of writer’s block. Young grabbed Trimble’s typewriter and without saying a word typed these words:

“The unperfect man pitched a perfect game yesterday.”

In later editions, that would be tweaked to what has become one of the most famous ledes in the history of newspapers: “The imperfect man pitched a perfect game yesterday.”

That was Larsen. For one day, he was the greatest pitcher who ever lived. The other 411 games of his career? The other 1,539 innings he logged for seven teams from 1953 through 1967? Not so much. And that was always OK with Larsen. You never met a guy happier to have accomplished something.

“Hell, yeah, I’m glad it happened to me,” he told me over the phone in 2009. “I think about it every day — and not just once a day. As long as they play baseball, they’ll remember the name ‘Don Larsen.’ That works for me.”

The call was to commemorate the 10th anniversary of David Cone’s perfect game, which had come on Yogi Berra Day, and Larsen just happened to be in the house that day, too. A year earlier, David Wells had thrown a perfecto; Wells had attended Point Loma High School in San Diego — same as Don Larsen, class of 1947.

Larsen loved everything about being a star in New York, probably loved it too much. Mickey Mantle, who would surely have known, once said, “Don had a startling capacity for liquor.” But he was right as rain on Oct. 8, 1956, and he made it to 90, and he got his money’s worth, both quality and quantity. And he was always happy you called.

Ref;nypost.com