10 Most Amazing Single-Game Stat Lines in MLB History
A 162-game season means most nights blend into each other by August. But every few years someone has a game so absurd it stands apart from everything else on the schedule that year: a pitcher who doesn't let a single runner reach base, a hitter who can't make an out, something so strange it barely seems legal.
Here are ten of those games.
Don Larsen: The Only Perfect Game in World Series History
Larsen was a journeyman. Fourteen big-league seasons, a losing record, nothing close to a Hall of Fame arm. Then, on one October afternoon with the whole country watching, he retired all 27 batters he faced in a World Series game. It's still the only perfect game the postseason has ever seen.
More than 20 perfect games have happened in the regular season across MLB history. Exactly one has happened in October, under a level of pressure none of those other 20-something pitchers ever had to deal with.
Reggie Jackson: 3 Home Runs on 3 Swings
Not three homers in a game — three homers on three total swings, off three different pitchers, closing out a World Series. One swing per at-bat, ball gone every time.
He earned the "Mr. October" nickname across a whole career of postseason moments, but this one game is basically that nickname squeezed into nine innings. Nobody has matched it since.
Kerry Wood: 20 Strikeouts, One Hit Allowed
Wood was 20 years old, making his fifth career start, and he struck out 20 batters while giving up one scratch hit — tying the record for strikeouts in a nine-inning game. No walks, either. Houston barely put a ball in play all afternoon.
Plenty of pitchers go entire careers without a 20-strikeout game. Wood had his in his first month as a full-time big leaguer.
Johnny Vander Meer: Back-to-Back No-Hitters
He no-hit the Boston Bees on June 11. Four days later, in his next start, he no-hit the Brooklyn Dodgers too — in the first night game Ebbets Field ever hosted. Back-to-back starts, back-to-back no-hitters, decades before anyone worried about pitch counts.
Nobody has managed even a second instance of two in a row since, let alone three straight. Eighty-five years later, it's still just Vander Meer.
Nolan Ryan: A 7th No-Hitter, at Age 44
Ryan threw his seventh no-hitter at age 44, with 16 strikeouts attached to it — still more strikeouts than any pitcher has recorded in a no-hitter at any age. The next closest name on the career no-hitter list has three. Ryan has more than double that, by himself.
Most careers are over well before 44. Ryan was still blowing away lineups at an age when most guys have been retired for a decade already.
Rennie Stennett: 7-for-7 in a 9-Inning Game
Stennett came to the plate seven times in a nine-inning game and got a hit every single time — still the record for a nine-inning game. Pittsburgh won 22-0, so he kept getting extra trips to the plate, and the streak just never broke.
That's not a hot streak. That's an entire game breaking exactly right, plus extra at-bats, plus a hitter who doesn't miss once.
Shawn Green: 19 Total Bases
Green went 6-for-6: four home runs, a double, and a single, with 7 RBI. Nineteen total bases, still the record. He basically hit a season's worth of power into one afternoon and still had room left over for a clean single.
Four homers in a game is rare by itself. Doing it while going a perfect 6-for-6 and setting the total bases record in the same nine innings is a different category of afternoon.
Lou Gehrig: 4 Home Runs in a Game
Gehrig hit four home runs in one game, the first American Leaguer to do it in the 20th century. Fewer than 20 players in MLB history have ever managed four in a game.
And here's the part that still stings a little: the next morning's papers barely covered it, because John McGraw picked that same afternoon to announce his retirement as Giants manager. One of the great power days in the sport's history, buried on page two.
Neal Ball: The First Unassisted Triple Play
With the runners going on a hit-and-run, Ball, playing shortstop, caught the line drive, stepped on second to double off one runner, then tagged the other coming from first — all in one motion. Three outs. One fielder. Nobody else touched the ball. First unassisted triple play in league history.
There have only been a handful of these in the sport's entire history, and before that afternoon there had been zero. It needs the base situation, the batted ball, and the fielder's positioning to line up in one very specific way, and it simply hadn't happened yet.
Fernando Tatís Sr.: 2 Grand Slams in One Inning
Third inning, same pitcher, grand slam. He came up again later in that same inning and hit another one. Eight RBI in a single inning off a single pitcher — still the only time it's happened in MLB history.
Some players go entire seasons without a grand slam. Tatís hit two of them in about 20 minutes, in the same half-inning, and nobody has come within one of matching it since.
The Full Recap
Ten completely different flavors of unbelievable, spanning more than a century of baseball. Here's every one of them side by side.
A Few Things Worth Noting
Notice how many of these are about absence rather than volume. Larsen didn't just pitch well, he allowed nothing. Stennett didn't just hit well, he never made an out. Vander Meer's two starts didn't just go well, they produced zero hits, twice in a row. A lot of baseball's most legendary games get remembered for what didn't happen as much as what did.
Ball's triple play and Tatís's two grand slams have something else in common: nobody's come close to repeating either one. There's no "still standing, but barely" quality to them the way there is with some football and basketball records. They just haven't happened again, not once, in over a century of the sport being played.
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