The final game of the (1873) season for the still champion Empires was with the Rowenas on November 9, who defeated the former in a score of 12 to 7. It was a reckless and carelessly played game with nothing in it for the Empires to win or loss and but a portion of the regular nine participated in it. Andy Blong Umpired the game and he and the scorers all say that there was not a single earned run in the whole game.-E.H. Tobias, writing in The Sporting News, January 18, 1896
That's a bit odd. Eighteen runs scored in a game and all of them were unearned. I can honestly say that I've never seen anything like that in all my years of watching baseball. Certainly, the number of unearned runs scored in a 19th century baseball game was very high due to the lack of gloves and large number of errors but to have a game played where not one single earned run was scored must have been exceedingly rare. It was certainly unique enough for Tobias to mention it.
2 comments:
Keep in mind that they defined earned runs differently then. A run had to score entirely on hits to be earned; a walk or wild pitch would make it unearned.
Cliff-
Sorry about taking so long to get your comment posted. All the comments on posts older than two weeks have to be manually approved. This helps to eliminate a lot of spam but it also means I have to pay attention to who's posting what.
Anyway, the unearned run situation is interesting. We had a long discussion about it a couple of months ago (I think) when I broke down unearned runs as a percentage of total runs scored in 1876. I can't remember if the rules came up but the context was more along the lines of judging team defensive skill based on the number of errors and unearned runs allowed.
I think the bottom line is that, regardless of the rules, clubs committed a large number of errors and that led to a large number of unearned runs. Nothing shocking in that really. It's what you're going to get when you play baseball without gloves.
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