May 18, 2022

Fun With Linescores!

I have an Excel spreadsheet with every major league linescore from 1901 to 2021 (imported from Retrosheet's text file logs). This is exciting news for me. (It may be somewhat less exciting for you.)

The first thing I can tell you is that in those 121 years of major league baseball (a total of 203,095 games), there have been 16 instances of a team scoring, over four consecutive innings, 1-2-3-4 runs. It has happened five times in the first four innings (what I call a Ramones linescore*), by only two franchises: 

June 4, 1925 - Pirates 16 vs Phillies 3
May 29, 1943 - Pirates 12 vs Phillies 4
September 7, 1977 - Tigers 12 vs Orioles 5
September 23, 2001 - Tigers 12 at Red Sox 6
June 14, 2016 - Tigers 11 at White Sox 8

No team has scored 1-2-3-4-5 runs in consecutive innings (since at least 1901) at any point in a game.

There have been 19 games in which a team scored exactly one run in six consecutive innings, building a "picket fence" (do announcers still use that phrase?). Two of those 19 games happened on the same day (August 24, 1997). In the span of one week in 2001, the Royals had two opponents score one run in six consecutive innings (August 21 and 27).

Only one team has scored a single run in seven consecutive innings: the Padres did it against the Dodgers on April 9, 1982. And they did it without hitting any home runs in the entire game.

Are you curious if a team has ever scored 10+ runs in an inning twice in a game? It has happened twice:

August 25, 1922: Cubs 26, Phillies 23 (Cubs scored 10 in 2nd and 14 in fourth)
July 6, 1929: Cardinals 28, Phillies 6 (Cardinals scored 10 in 1st and 10 in fifth)

The most runs scored in a game where all of the runs were scored in only one inning is 13. The Phillies beat the Reds 13-1 on April 13, 2003, scoring all 13 runs in the top of the fourth.

Because several National League teams have scored in all nine innings as the visiting team, there is no list (that I know of) of NL home teams who have scored in all eight innings and did not bat in the ninth. I have a short list of those games, but this should help me find them all.

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