This story was excerpted from Adam Berry's Rays Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

NEW YORK -- Drew Rasmussen and his wife, Stevie, are expecting their first child, a boy, in mid-September. His pursuit of history on Sunday afternoon nearly changed her due date.

Nobody was hanging on to every pitch of Rasmussen’s perfect-game bid quite like Stevie, of course, from her seat at Tropicana Field.

“Oh, gosh, she told me I was going to send her into labor,” Rasmussen said. “I think she was more nervous than I was.”

Rasmussen was perfect for eight innings against the Orioles on Sunday, three outs away from completing the 24th perfect game in Major League history. He credited Stevie for doing her part, staying in her seat throughout his outing -- no late-inning bathroom breaks, even -- and reflected a day later on a question she asked him after he lost the perfecto bid on his first pitch of the ninth inning.

After retiring the first 24 hitters he faced, Rasmussen threw Jorge Mateo a cutter that landed in the middle of the plate. Mateo smacked it down the left-field line for a double and eventually scored, and Rasmussen had to settle for the most dominant outing of his career -- not a perfect game, not a no-hitter, not a shutout, not a complete game.

He had no regrets.

“My wife asked me, 'Hey, if you could face Mateo again, would you do anything different?' No. I threw the pitch I wanted to throw,” Rasmussen said Monday at Yankee Stadium. “I mean, was the execution perfect? No, not at all. It ended up middle-middle. But like I said, I threw the pitch I wanted to throw, and I threw it with intent and conviction, and I wouldn't change it for the world.”

His almost-perfect outing led to his phone blowing up Sunday night and throughout Monday, with hundreds of messages flooding in through texts and social media. He heard from all his former coaches, from Little League to high school to Oregon State (where he completed a perfect game in 2015), and everyone from best friends to people he hadn’t spoken with in years.

(The coolest one, apparently, was a tweet from college basketball broadcaster/noted die-hard Rays fan Dick Vitale.)

“It’s all love and support, and all words of encouragement,” Rasmussen said, “so it was nice to see.”