Remembrance of Ballgames Past

Yesterday, I attended a hell of a game at Yankee Stadium. The Yanks fell behind the Seattle Mariners 7-1 by the second inning, but crept back. They closed the gap to 7-5 by the eighth inning, then loaded the bases in both the eighth and ninth, before finally losing 7-6.

Still, this was a great game, and it fits in with a tradition of epic Yanks-Mariners slugfests which my brother and I have attended over the past five years (average time: 3:56, combined runs per game: 18). I spent some time today trying to research the details of those games and came across this page, which has links to game summaries and box scores back to July 12, 1995. Through the aid of this, I was able to track down each of the four other Yanks-M’s games we’d attended. I’ll be writing about those in the next few days, but for right now, discovering this page and being able to reclaim these little slivers of history makes me feel completely complete.

Here is an open question I hope somebody can answer for me: How rare is it for both teams to combine to score in every inning? One of these ballgames (April 30, 1998) featured that occurrence, which I’m guessing is more rare than a no-hitter. I’ve watched two full no-hitters (Nolan Ryan’s #5 in 1981, and Jack Morris in 1984) and parts of several others, but I’ve never seen this happen until that night. Here is the line score:

Seattle                 102 000 140 0--8 11  2

New York                020 113 001 1--9 15  1

If anyone knows the answer as to how frequent this occurrence is, please email me at jay@futilityinfielder.com or via my contact form here.