1869: Niagara Routs Columbia 209-10, But Still Fails To Score In Every Inning

Scoring at least one run in every inning of a nine-inning baseball game is not an easy thing to do. You can count the number of times it has happened in the 120 years of "modern" major league baseball on one hand.

Let's say you heard that a baseball team had scored 209 runs in a single game. You probably would not be surprised to learn that team had scored in every inning. The Colorado Rockies scored only 13 runs on May 5, 1999, but managed to get at least one in each of its nine innings. So scoring 196 additional runs should make that feat pretty easy. And yet . . .

On June 8, 1869, in Buffalo, New York, Niagara beat Columbia 209-10 – with every player scoring at least 20 runs – but somehow managed to not score in the fourth inning!

Niagara  –  40 20  9    0 18 19   26 58 19  –  209
Columbia –   2  3  1    0  1  3    0  0  0  –   10

In the top of the eighth, Niagara batted around almost seven times, sending at least 61 batters to the plate. In the last 112 major league seasons (1908-2019), there have been only 27 games in which a team has sent at least 61 batters to the plate in an entire nine-inning game. The major league record is 66, held by the 1922 Cubs.

Here's something even crazier. Columbia used only one pitcher. Some poor sap named Mack threw – if he averaged four pitches per batter – roughly 950 pitches that afternoon (delivering the ball underhanded, but still). Mack put his team in a 40-0 hole before they even walked to the plate. Only Charlie Brown knows what that must feel like.

But then Mack allowed half as many runs in the second inning and half again in the third. Then he tossed a scoreless fourth! He must have felt like he was finally settling down – though how far out of the weeds can you really be when you're down 69-6? . . . And then things really went to shit. (But, look, he retired every opposing batter at least once.)

You think any Columbia batters were trying to rally their teammates in the bottom of the ninth? Okay, we can do this, just gotta get on, choke up, stay focused, their pitcher's gotta be tired from all that baserunning, whack a little bingle, keep the line moving, it's never over till it's over . . .

Columbia could have batted around 17 times in the bottom of the ninth and still lost by four dozen runs.

Niagara's batters ran more than 14 miles on the bases and every Niagara player crossed the plate at least 20 times.

And it was all wrapped up in a tidy three hours.

The Buffalo Express, June 9, 1869:

Updated with another box score, which features different spellings for a few names, most notably Columbia's shortstop, who was either Pretteye or Britze (or perhaps both of those are wrong)! We also learn that Columbia had challenged the Niagara to the contest. Oops!

The Buffalo Commercial, June 9, 1869: