A High-Scoring Day for the History Books Echoes Baseball’s Chaotic Past

Tuesday’s league-wide offensive outburst had happened only once before—on July 4, 1894, a day that shows how much baseball has changed and remained the same.

One of baseball’s supposed greatest joys is the chance to see on any given night something that has never happened before. But I’ve always preferred a cousin of this idea—related, but different, a little twistier. What I love is the chance to see on any given night something that has happened before, just not for a very, very long time.

These historical ties have always been more enchanting to me than sheer novelty has. The game is constantly evolving; we know this, we can watch rule changes and box scores and shifts in roster construction to be reminded of how true this is. There is newness all around. 

Which is what makes the opposite so charming. Sometimes, a game shows you something new, and sometimes, a game slips backward across a century and change and sees its reflection staring back at it.

On Tuesday night, 12 teams scored 10 or more runs. It was the first time that had happened since July 4, 1894, when a record 13 teams scored 10 or more. 

The eight games from Tuesday that featured at least one team scoring 10 runs averaged a total of 14.8 singles, four home runs and 17.6 strikeouts :: Charlie Riedel/AP

The games of July 18, 2023 were, obviously, materially different from those of July 4, 1894. (For one, I absorbed the former by a combination of streaming, mobile push notifications and social media; I absorbed the latter by spelunking in the archives of the Philadelphia Inquirer, which deemed it “a good day” for “slugging matches.”) 

But they’re similar, too. They’re clearly linked by their high scoring totals. And they’re a show of how baseball can take very (very) different paths to end up with commensurate results.

To state the obvious: The baseball of 1894 looked very little like the baseball of 2023. There were far fewer home runs and far, far fewer strikeouts. There were almost triple the stolen bases and six times the triples. The scoring environment was vastly different: 1894, in fact, is still the highest scoring year of the last 140 seasons. (If you thought the steroid era led to high scoring totals? You should see what baseball got from constantly putting the ball in play in a time of sloppy fielding. There were an average of 7.4 runs per team per game in 1894! Compare that to the modern peak of 5.14 runs in 2000 or the current figure of 4.6.) It was, in short, enormously different from the baseball we see today. 

Yet it gave us something almost exactly the same as what we saw on Tuesday. With relatively few home runs, dozens of singles and so, so many errors, 13 teams scored 10 or more runs on July 4, 1894.

Take a look at the combined box score totals for all of those games:

Score	1B	2B	3B	HR	E	K	Time
CHC 16, PHI 10	35	4	1	1	6	3	2:05
PHI 12, CHC 11	27	8	2	0	9	3	2:15
NYG 12, CLE 11	32	8	3	2	2	6	1:55
LOU 11, BAL 1	22	1	2	1	5	3	1:50
WAS 10, STL 5	16	1	1	2	0	8	2:50
STL 15, WAS 8	26	1	5	0	9	6	2:10
PIT 13, BOS 11	31	5	2	0	9	7	2:30
CIN 14, BRO 7	30	3	2	3	7	3	2:30
CIN 13, BRO 8	28	4	1	1	6	1	2:20
Averages	27.4	3.9	2.1	1.1	5.9	4.4	2:16

Every team played a doubleheader. (It was the Fourth of July, after all.) The papers crowed about the robust holiday attendance everywhere save St. Louis, where it was cloudy and drizzling, and the resulting games offered all the textured glory that any day of baseball might. 

Last-place Louisville managed to thump first-place Baltimore. (Louisville rookie outfielder Fred Clarke had “one of the most sensational catches ever seen on the grounds.” The 21-year-old had only just joined the team and would ultimately become a Hall of Famer.) Fans closely watched the four-way cluster for third place in the pennant race: Pittsburgh, New York, Philadelphia and Brooklyn were all within a few games of each other. What had been a pitchers’ duel between Pittsburgh and Boston devolved when the Pirates’ starter was ejected in the sixth for excessive profanity (alas, his exact words were not documented by the papers) and the Beaneaters’ left in the seventh after injuring his hand. The Phillies got frustrated that the “very disorderly” afternoon crowd in Chicago threw firecrackers into the outfield. 

It was nothing like July 18, 2023, except, of course, for all of the ways it was more or less the same.

Here are the combined box scores from Tuesday night:

Scores	1B	2B	3B	HR	E	K	Time
LAD 10, BAL 3	16	5	0	1	5	17	3:18
CLE 10, PIT 1	12	2	0	4	1	14	2:15
SFG 11, CIN 10	17	2	0	6	2	27	3:30
NYM 11, CHW 10	12	5	0	5	0	19	3:28
ARI 16, ATL 13	13	7	1	6	3	12	3:05
CHC 17, WAS 3	23	3	0	3	1	19	2:50
KCR 11, DET 10	12	8	2	2	1	14	2:28
MIN 10, SEA 3	13	4	1	5	1	19	3:02
Averages	14.8	4.5	0.5	4	1.8	17.6	2:59

There were more strikeouts, obviously, and fewer errors. The games were longer on average, though still under three hours—a remarkable credit to the pitch clock. A game with this much scoring still might feature just one or two home runs. There still might be nearly two dozen singles in one night. It is possible, on the right day, for the box scores to align and find themselves right in front of who they used to be.