Friend of the VORG Doug Kern from ESPN tweeted out the following a week ago …
This is the first day in baseball history where four games ended with a final score of 9-4. Only time I even found three was May 5, 1995.
— Doug Kern (@dakern74) September 3, 2015
Which I responded to:
@dakern74 well now I know my next blog post idea — Diane Firstman (@dianagram) September 3, 2015
And Doug replied:
@dianagram The silly thing is, *I* know your next blog post idea too. ?
— Doug Kern (@dakern74) September 3, 2015
Doug is indeed right that May 5, 1995 is the only date on which three 9-4 games had been played, so this was a new “record”.
My “idea” was to find which date(s) featured the most games with the same final score, be it 9-4 or something else.
With the help of the Retrosheet game logs, here are the “winners” since 1871, with six instances each on the same day. Not surprisingly, they are low-scoring games decided by one run. This is consistent with my finding in examining the final scores of all games from 1871-2010, where 4-3 and 2-1 were two of the top three most frequent outcomes.
| DATE | SCORE | GAMES | TOT GAMES |
|---|---|---|---|
| 19720924 | 2-1 | 6 | 9 |
| 20121002 | 4-3 | 6 | 8 |
Thank you Doug for the inspiration!