Pitchers with the ‘Most-Hitters’

A week before SABR’s No-Hitters manuscript was to be delivered to our book designer, I was prompted to wonder: OK, in a no-hitter, we have a game in which one pitcher gave up no hits. Zero. But what was the opposite? What was the game in which the most hits were surrendered by one pitcher? What were the “most-hitters”? Naturally, I turned to SABR’s Lyle Spatz and asked him.

His answer: 36 hits. Louisville’s Jack Wadsworth had a game in 1894 during which he gave up 36 hits.

If you want to count only the years since 1900, there are four games tied for the “honor” with 26 hits apiece. Lyle listed them:

• 26: Al Orth, 1900 Phillies
• 26: Doc Parker, 1901 Reds
• 26: Al Travers, 1912 Tigers (Ty Cobb strike game)
• 26: Hod Lisenbee, 1936 A’s

I had also asked Lyle which extra-inning game saw a pitcher give up the most base hits. He directed me to Eddie Rommel who in 1932 had given up 29 hits while pitching the last 17 innings of an 18-inning game. That alone seemed to offer the likelihood of a good story.

Short of writing up Games Project accounts of all six games – which I recommend to a willing author – an editor with a little more than a week to wrap up all the editorial jobs of producing a book  provides some brief accounts of the games in question.

August 17, 1894: Jack Wadsworth (36 hits)

Wadsworth played professional baseball from 1890 through 1990, most of it in the minor leagues, but he pitched four seasons in the National League, for Cleveland in 1890 (2-16), Baltimore in 1893 (0-3), and the Louisville Colonels in 1894 and 1895. He was 4-18 with Louisville in 1894 and 0-1 in 1895. Simple addition shows a career major-league record of 6-38; he had a 6.85 earned-run average. One of his losses – not surprisingly, given the 36 base hits he allowed – was the August 17 game in Philadelphia. The Colonels were in 11th place at the time; they finished the season in 12th (last) place. The Phillies finished fourth.

The home team did not always bat last at the time, so the Phillies batted in all nine innings; the only one in which they did not score was the second. While Kid Carsey of the Phillies held the Colonels to four runs on eight hits (Wadsworth had one of them), the Phillies scored 29 runs on 36 hits, totaling 49 bases. Wadsworth apparently had no trouble getting the ball over the plate; he walked only three. But that was perhaps his problem – the ball being straight and over the plate. Despite all the runners circling the bases (there were 12 left on base), the entire game was played in 2 hours and 5 minutes. At game’s end, wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Wadsworth’s arm hung limp and the Louisville fielders’ tongues were hanging out, the result of their running after long hits.”1

Right fielder Sam Thompson had the best day at the plate, 6-for-7 with 12 total bases, including a home run. Mike Grady, Joe Sullivan, and Billy Hamilton each had five hits. “Poor old Wadsworth!” lamented the Oregonian in Portland.2 Both teams brought on a catcher in relief during the game, but both starting pitchers went the distance.3 The Evening Star of Washington, DC, suggested one of the reasons for the success of the Philadelphia batters: “It is claimed that [Phillies manager Arthur] Irwin discovered Wadsworth’s signs.”4

April 19, 1900: Al Orth (26 hits)

Highlighting the magnitude of Wadsworth’s accomplishment is the fact that the closest anyone has come to matching it still fell 10 base hits short. Al Orth was 14-14 (3.78) for the 1900 Phillies, but he almost blew his first start, on Opening Day (and Patriots Day) at the Boston Beaneaters’ South End Grounds in front of large crowd of around 10,000 fans. Staked to a healthy 17-8 lead heading into the bottom of the ninth, and with several thousand dispirited Boston fans having beat an early exit, Orth let things fell apart. He’d given up 17 hits through eight, though the hits were, in the kind view of the Boston Globe, “well distributed.”5 Buck Freeman pinch-hit and homered to kick things off for Boston, then Shad Barry bunted for a base hit. There followed, in all, nine hits accounting for nine runs – and Boston had tied it up, 17-17. Had Fred Tenney singled, it would have been all over, but he grounded out to Delahanty at first base and the game went to the 10th inning. Tenney was the only Beaneater who never made a hit.

The Phillies scored two runs in the top of the 10th, thanks to an error by Bobby Lowe. Bill Bernhard took over for Orth, and retired the Bostons 1-2-3. Orth thus gave up 26 hits but his team won the game.

June 21, 1901: Doc Parker (26 hits)

Cincinnati’s Harley Parker had pitched two innings for the Cubs in 1893. He was 4-2 for the Cubs in 1895 and 1-5 in 1896. He was a doctor, and had been pitching in weekend semipro games around Chicago but reappeared in the majors in 1901, joining the Cincinnati Reds on June 19 – and wound up pitching in only one game. The game was at Brooklyn’s Washington Park. The Brooklyn Eagle wrote, “It was a case of ‘biff and run’ from the sound of the bell.”6

The Brooklyn Superbas won, 21-3. They scored in every one of the first seven innings; every player on the team banked at least one base hit. Wee Willie Keeler was 5-for-5 and scored five times, too, before checking out of the game to give Cozy Dolan a chance to get some playing time in right field. Had they even tried in the bottom of the eighth? Maybe not. The Eagle averred, “[T]hey grew tired of circling the bases. They just lobbed at the ball in the eighth and allowed themselves to be retired without attempting to run out the hits, which were fielded slowly and painfully by the tired and weary Cincinnatis.”7

The Superbas didn’t even have to bat in the bottom of the ninth; they’d already won.  So Parker had been hit for 26 base hits, with 34 total bases, in eight innings of work.

The Cincinnati Post wrote of its Reds, “They played like amateurs against Brooklyn. Parker won’t linger long if he showed the best he had in stock.”8 The loss was the 10th in 11 games, the only game not a loss being a 6-6, 12-inning tie. The Reds finished in last place.

May 18, 1912: Al Travers (26 hits)

As with Harley Parker in 1901, Travers pitched in just one game in the year in question – in fact, it was the only major-league game in which he ever appeared. He was 20 years old at the time he was asked to take the mound pitching for the Detroit Tigers at Philadelphia’s Shibe Park, “a student at nearby St. Joseph’s College. A few years later, he would become Father Aloysius S. Travers, S.J., and to this day he is the only Catholic priest ever to play in a major league game.”9

Three days earlier, Ty Cobb had climbed into the stands at New York’s Hilltop Park and savagely beaten a disabled spectator who had just one hand and only two fingers on the other hand. AL President Ban Johnson saw the incident first-hand and he handed Cobb an indefinite suspension from baseball. As many as 13 Tigers went on strike in support of Cobb. The Washington Post editorialized in support of Cobb, blaming the police for not having removed the “blackguard” who had been verbally abusing him.10

It’s not that Travers had been a standout college pitcher; “he later confessed that he had never pitched a game in his life.”11 The replacement third baseman had never before played baseball. It was a farce (in the words of the Philadelphia Inquirer, “the greatest farce in the baseball line that has ever been unloaded upon the public since the inception of the game.”12 The Tigers fielded a “joke team of schoolboys … and the world’s champions ‘fattened’ on the ‘strikebreakers.’”13

Travers was actually somewhat effective in the early going; the score was only 6-2 after four innings. Perhaps the Athletics were keyed up to face major-league pitching and simply didn’t know how to handle his slow curves. But then they scored eight times in the fifth and added another 10 runs. The final was 24-2, Travers having given up 26 hits and walking seven. He struck out one.

September 11, 1936: Hod Lisenbee (26 hits)

Hod Lisenbee was something of a veteran. In his rookie year with the 1927 Washington Senators, he was 18-9. Though he never had another year that good, he pitched in some 682 minor- and major-league games. Arm problems dogged him throughout, problems apparently never satisfactorily diagnosed, but they didn’t keep him for trying. When he took the mound on September 11, 1936, for the Philadelphia Athletics in Chicago. He’d appeared in 15 games for the A’s with an earned-run average of 4.91 and a record of 1-5.

The White Sox jumped on him for four hits and four runs in the first inning, only one run of which was earned. He gave up two singles over the next three innings; the score was 4-1 at midpoint. In the bottom of the fifth, however, he gave up four more runs on six hits. In the sixth it was three more runs on four more hits. With the score now 11-1, the game was out of hand but manager Connie Mack still wouldn’t pull Lisenbee. After six hits (four runs) in the seventh and four more hits (two more runs) in the eighth, the score was 17-1. Philadelphia scored once in the top of the ninth, but fell 15 runs of short of forcing Lisenbee to take the mound in the bottom of the innings. Lisenbee’s ERA jumped in one game, from 4.91 up to 6.03.

The most hits in extra innings / July 10, 1932: Ed Rommel (29 hits)

Eddie Rommel pitched 13 seasons for the Philadelphia Athletics (he was 171-119), and 1932 was the last of those 13 seasons. Twice – in 1922 and 1925 – he had been a 20-game winner. From 1928 on, he’d worked more as a reliever. In 1932 he pitched exclusively in relief. He was without a decision through July 9, and had just worked two innings on July 8 and three more on July 9.

On July 10 he pitched again in relief, in Cleveland. Lew Krausse started the game and gave up three runs on four hits in the first inning. Rommel was brought in. He never left, working 17 innings. In the end, he faced off in a duel of relievers as Wes Ferrell threw 11⅓ innings as Cleveland’s third pitcher in the game. Four times, the lead switched. When the A’s scored seven times in the top of the seventh, they took a 13-8 lead – the fifth time the lead had changed, only to see the Indians score six times in the bottom of the seventh (and effect another lead change).

After nine innings, the score was tied, 15-15. Then followed six scoreless innings. The Athletics scored twice in the top of the 16th when Jimmie Foxx slammed his third home run of the game. (He drove in eight runs.) It looked as though Rommel might get a win. But four more hits – a double, followed by three singles –tied the score again. There was no scoring in the 17th. With two outs in the top of the 18th, Foxx singled (his sixth hit of the game) and scored on Eric McNair’s double. Rommel had already given up 29 hits, but in the bottom of the 18th he wrapped two strikeouts around a groundout and left the field with a “W.”

The two teams combined for 58 hits, 25 by the A’s and 33 by the Indians. Rommel gave up 29 hits, 20 of them from the second inning through the ninth, and then only nine hits over the next nine innings.

He’d endured, he’d improved, and in the end, Rommel had given up 29 hits and he had won the game.

Cleveland’s Johnny Burnett had nine hits all by himself, eight of them off Rommel.

It was Rommel’s last season. Starting in 1938, he became an American League umpire and served for 22 years, working 3,369 big-league ballgames.

Red Sox fan BILL NOWLIN has never seen the Red Sox held hitless but has been fortunate to see Red Sox pitchers throw four no-hitters — Dave Morehead, Derek Lowe, Jon Lester, and Devern Hansack.* He has written or edited more than 60 books, mostly about baseball, and has served on SABR’s Board of Directors since 2004. He’s also in the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.

 

Notes

1 “Phillies Make New Records,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 18, 1894: 3.

2 “The National League,” Oregonian (Portland), August 18, 1894: 2.

3 “It Rained Hits for Phillies,” Boston Journal, August 18, 1894: 3.

4 “Other League Games,” Evening Star (Washington, DC), August 18, 1894: 7. The pitcher, rather than his catcher, was the one indicating which pitch he planned to throw.

5 T.H. Murnane, “Runs Galore,” Boston Globe, April 20, 1900: 1.

6 “Base Hits Galore for the Champions,” Brooklyn Eagle, June 22, 1901: 8.

7 “Base Hits Galore for the Champions,” Brooklyn Eagle, June 22, 1901: 8.

8 Ren Mulford Jr., “Simply Awful,” Cincinnati Post, June 22, 1901: 2.

9 Greg Livacari, “Al Travers,” SABR BioProject, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/8b444434.

10 “Baseball Rowdies,” Washington Post, May 19, 1912: ES4.

11 “Baseball Rowdies,” Washington Post, May 19, 1912: ES4.

12 “Tigers Quit Field; Cobb Is Suspended,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 19, 1912: 17.

13 “Famous Detroit Ball Team Strikes,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 19, 1912: A1.