The Rangers Scored 30...But Who Scored 29?

The Texas Rangers lit up the Baltimore Orioles for a modern-day record thirty runs last night, which must be a big deal because this is my third consecutive post on the subject and virtually every other sports blog and mainstream media site has covered it in some way, shape or form.

With all the attention focused on the frontier justice perpetrated by the Rangers (take that, Erik Bedard!), the teams that previously held the mark for most runs in a nine inning game with 29 have slipped back into history virtually unnoticed. Sure, there's all this talk about the Chicago Colts and how they once scored 37 runs in a game way back in 1897, but since when do we care about baseball records set before 1900? Since never, that's when.

So let's take a look at the teams that held the record before the Rangers. There were two of them, both of which played prior to the Retrosheet Era (sorry, no box scores) and beat teams that kinda sorta no longer exist, at least in the same form. The first was the 1950 Boston Red Sox, a lineup that featured two Hall of Famers (Ted Williams and Bobby Doerr), three borderline candidates (Johnny Pesky, Vern Stephens, and Dom DiMaggio) and scored 1,027 runs on the season.

On June 8 at Fenway Park (which had a ridiculous 110 Park Factor for batting and 107 for pitching that year), the Sox absolutely demolished the St. Louis Browns (a team that ironically later moved to Baltimore and became the Orioles) by the score of 29-4. It was, at the time and for the next 57 years, the largest margin of victory in modern major league history. Even more impressive was that the slaughter was a two-day affair: on June 7, that vaunted Boston lineup had warmed up with another laugher, 20-4.

As mentioned above, I couldn't find a box score for this game online, so here is some of the vital information (from Baseball Library):

Bobby Doerr has three home runs and eight RBI; Walt Dropo, two home runs and seven RBI, and Ted Williams, two home runs and five RBI, all collecting a round tripper in the 8th inning. Pitcher Chuck Stobbs walks four times in four innings, Al
Zarilla adds four doubles, including two in one inning, and a single—with no ribbies—as the Sox set a major-league record with 58 total bases...Leadoff batter Clyde Vollmer goes to the plate eight times in eight innings, the only time this has happened in history.

The second pre-Texas record holder was the other Sox, the Chicago variety, which on April 23, 1955, beat the tar out of the Kansas City Athletics by a score of 29-6. Like Boston, the 1955 Chicago lineup featured a pair of Hall of Famers (George Kell and Nellie Fox) and at least one maybe (Minnie Minoso), as well as former Red Sox Walt Dropo and Vern Stephens, who were both on the 1950 team that originally set the record. It was a far less prolific lineup, however, scoring nearly 300 fewer runs (727), but the pitching staff was also better, giving up about 250 less on the season (804 to 557).

Again, no box score online (oh, how accustomed I've come to the magic of the Retrosheet Era!), but Baseball Historian did have a reprint of the newspaper article that ran the following day. The focus: journeyman catcher Sherm Lollar, who homered twice and tied a major league record by twice hitting safely two times in one inning.


The thing that amazes me most about these games is that they were both played before the advent of the designated hitter rule, which means the pitchers came to bat several times for each team. The Baseball Library article quoted above mentions that Boston's pitcher drew four walks in four innings - imagine if that position had been a DH instead of the pitcher, how many runs that might have added to the final total.

For my money, however, the craziest fact here is that the Red Sox were the home team. Not only did they not have the benefit of the designated hitter, they only got to bat eight times in the game. And as Texas' six-run ninth against Baltimore showed, those three extra outs can make a world of difference.