Pitching perfection is in the eye of the beholder; for Woody Williams, a perfect game is whenever he picks up a victory.

IT'S BEEN ALMOST TWO YEARS SINCE it was reported that John Curtis, the former major league pitcher, was writing a book on the 16 Perfect Games. Curtis knows whereof he speaks: he once carried a perfecto into the eighth, and plunged into the subject after Roger Craig, one of his managers, told him, "John, there is no such thing as a perfect game."

Instinctively, Curtis agreed. He'd had a 15-year big league career with the Red Sox, Cardinals, Giants, Padres and Angels, and understood the numerous variables that come into play. And so with the help of San Diego announcer Mark Grant, also a former big league pitcher, Curtis has interviewed prominent pitchers for their views.

Some of their findings:

Tom Glavine: "You can give up five or six hits and can throw a perfect game. Absolutely. If you throw 100 pitches and all of them are where you wanted to throw them, with the proper movement, regardless of how many hits you give up, whether or not you walked somebody, to me, that would be a perfect game. I'm not sure that's possible. And it's certainly not 27 up, 27 down."

Denny Neagle: "It would be a game where you feel like everything is on, every time you wanted a pitch to hit a certain spot, and that happens. Back door 'em with the breaking ball, the slider on the black, throwing a two-seam fastball around the corner. I did that one time in Game 4 of the 1997 NLCS game against the Marlins. I threw a four-hit shutout and the four hits they got were two infield hits and two bloopers. Everything was on that day. I could not have thrown any better than that."

Mike Krukow: "When I first came up with the Cubs, Rick Reuschel was sitting in the clubhouse with me and he said, `One game I want to throw before I quit, is a 14-hit shutout where I get lit up, and I just figure a way to get out of it. And here's the rest of the scenario. You have nothing that day. Nothing. Not only that, but the umpire's strike zone is miniscule.'

"That's the way it was in 1987 in the fourth game of the playoffs against the Cardinals. We (Giants) were down two games to one and we had to absolutely win this game. Every inning was a puzzle. My only mistake was an 0-2 pitch to pitcher Danny Cox. We won, 4-2. And because of the pressure in that game, what it meant to our organization, what it meant to me as a player, and how I got through nine innings with nothing, that was my idea of a perfect game. It wasn't a 14-hit shutout, but it was getting it done with nothing."