I’ll Bet That’s Never Happened Before

I’ll Bet That’s Never Happened Before

Baseball Says, “Not So Fast.”

Joseph Heinzmann

Tripp Whitbeck, a Washington Nationals fan and a “recovering lawyer,” traded motions and depositions for mash bills and bourbon barrels, distilling award-winning bourbon. Nationals fans know him well. I know him as the kind of baseball fan who asks wonderfully dangerous questions. 

Not the kind of grave danger to which Col. Jessup famously alluded in A Few Good Men. The kind of danger that will cost you a week of your life, a missed meal or two, and a post-midnight squawk, “Are you still up?” from across the house.

Tripp tweeted (is it still a tweet?), “What is the highest ‘reverse delta’ in run differential in back-to-back games in MLB history?” A simple question. Or so it seemed.

His beloved Nationals beat the Cardinals 23-4, then followed it up the next day by losing 15-1. A 33-run swing in twenty-four hours. Surely that had to be a record. Baseball heard the question, smiled, and quietly wandered off toward 1873. One day you’re the ’27 Yankees. Then you wake up as the ’62 Mets. (Cleveland Spiders fans, we see you. Sit down.)  

Tripp should have known better. Whenever someone thinks they’ve found something unprecedented, Baseball says, “Not so fast.”

I’ve been asking questions like this for more than 50 years. In 1971, when I was eight years old, my father taught me how to read a box score and compute a batting average. But what my father really taught me was more than how to read a box score; he taught me to look for the stories hiding behind the numbers.

I pored over the newspaper, the kind that made your hands dirty after just a few minutes, and saw the box score for the Royals/Twins game played on July 9, 1971. Some people just saw a box score. I saw a question, something that seemed impossible. Freddie Patek, the diminutive shortstop, listed generously at 5’5” and 148 lbs dripping wet, had four hits. I showed Dad and asked, “Did he really get one of every kind of hit?”

“Yep.”

“I’ll bet that’s never happened before.”

That sentence became the theme of my baseball life. It sparked a lifelong fascination with baseball anomalies. Of course I learned that hitting for the cycle, what Patek accomplished that July day, while unusual, was not unheard of. That curiosity stayed with me, leading to Bill James Abstracts, more than one Baseball Almanac, and a subscription to The Sporting News.

Of course, this wasn’t the last time I said, “I’ll bet that’s never happened before.” I said it on May 17, 1979 as I watched the Phillies beat the Cubs 23-22. Surely both teams scoring over 20 runs had never happened before. Not only was I wrong, it happened with the same two teams playing on the same field on August 25, 1922. The Phillies won that one also, 26-23. Baseball once again replied, “Not so fast.”

Football fans have Scorigami. When an NFL game finishes with a never-before-recorded score, the internet collectively loses its mind. I love that they love it. But Baseball just smiles and says, “Bless your hearts.” 

You think you found something unique? Baseball has been telling you for 155 years that you haven’t.

In its own unique way, Baseball speaks in a language that its audience understands. At eight, I marveled at Patek’s cycle, but I treasured just as much the joy of figuring out what happened at a game I never saw. ESPN’s Top Ten wasn’t even a kernel of an idea.

Sixteen-year-old me, seeing those Cubs daytime offensive explosions, was always on the quest for the surface-level trivia of a slugfest and all its oddities. Like most smartypants boys, I loved the one-up culture of “my obscure trivia knowledge bests yours.” Baseball accommodated.

As the ego of youth subsided, the love of baseball’s history remained. There’s something humbling about digging through baseball’s past. We like to think we invented everything and accomplished feats nobody accomplished before, when, in reality, we’ve inherited far more than we’ve created.

And the more I discover about the people who built this game, the more I appreciate and want to share what they left us. Even the Elizabeth Resolutes, although I didn’t know it yet.

So back to Tripp’s question. He piqued my curiosity so I did what any normal person would have done. I downloaded every game from 1871 onward because a hobby is just an obsession with better public relations. Tripp coined the statistic, the “Reverse Delta.” Take a team’s run differential, then take the run differential from its next official game. Subtract one from the other. Ignore whether it’s positive or negative. Voilà, the Reverse Delta.

Simple. Elegant. Unnecessary. Perfect for baseball.

The first computer run had errors. Embarrassing errors. There’s nothing quite so humbling as having nineteenth-century baseball prove your math is wrong.

Unlike baseball, we got the luxury of a do-over. We recalculated. Then we verified. Then we verified the verification. Unlike Tripp, I am not a fully recovered lawyer.

That faint sound I heard in the background? That was Baseball chuckling politely, already knowing how this story ended.

On June 18, 1874, the New York Mutuals beat the Chicago White Stockings 38-1, a drubbing that remains the largest margin of victory in major league history. Bob Tiemann’s outstanding SABR Games Research Project article tells the story of that game better than I ever could. It includes gambling intrigue and some questionable umpiring that may have deprived Mutual pitcher Bobby Matthews of a no-hitter. 

Bobby Matthews? Before a fellow named Ruth came along, many considered Matthews Baltimore’s greatest ballplayer. He won 297 games, more than any pitcher not in the Hall of Fame, started and won the first major league game, and, for reasons known only to Baseball, stood exactly half an inch taller than Freddie Patek. 

Anyway, five days later, the Mutuals lost, only by seven runs, producing a Reverse Delta of 44, crushing the Nationals’ putative record of a mere 33.

For those modernists who want to pretend anything pre-1900 really wasn’t “baseball,” the 2000 Yankees from June 18-19 produced a Reverse Delta of 34, losing to the White Sox 17-4, beating the Red Sox the next day 22-1, and besting Tripp’s beloved Nationals by a single run.

Undaunted, Tripp moved the goalposts. Fair enough. It’s his statistic so he gets to define it. “What if both games had to be against the same team?”

Easy enough to figure this out. Plenty of room left for Baseball to snicker.

The Gold Medals go to:

The Boston Red Stockings and their almost worthy opponent, the Elizabeth Resolutes. If you’re wondering who the heck are the Elizabeth Resolutes, congratulations and welcome to the Baseball Curiosity Club. You are now where I was a few days ago.

The Resolutes played exactly one professional season and spent most of it demonstrating why there wouldn’t be a second. They were spectacularly terrible. But in baseball, even cellar dwellers occasionally shine, which the Resolutes did on July 4, 1873, beating Boston 11-2, their largest margin of victory. Their most humiliating defeat? Also July 4. Nineteenth-century baseball had some wonderfully strange rules, one of which helped produce a 32–3 drubbing. Baseball never loses its sense of humor. 

Congratulations if you deduced it was a doubleheader. In fact, it was the first major league doubleheader. Having won the opener by their largest margin of the season, I like to imagine the Resolutes celebrating between games over something supplied by the local brewery rather than Powerade. 

Medals? Plural? I think so. Tripp moved the goalposts but inadvertently deprived us of a single-team winner. Every same-opponent Reverse Delta is a group project. 

The Elizabeth Resolutes finally led professional baseball in something. Not bad for a team that didn’t even finish the season and won only two games.

Tripp, thanks for introducing me to the Resolutes and giving them the championship they never knew they were playing for.

Naturally, I couldn’t leave the Resolutes alone. They’re still around, in spirit, as a historical team playing by 1870s rules at Rahway River Park in New Jersey. And if press accounts are any guide, they still struggle to win games.

Who shares the Silver?

On June 28, 1897, the Louisville Colonels bested the Chicago Colts 7-2. The next day the Colts tallied 36 runs, winning 36-7 and logging a Reverse Delta of 34. Today, that’s two solid weeks of social media. In 1897, The Sporting News shrugged. One sentence. The SABR article by Bill Felber is a gem. 

The Colonels came back and won the next game, but only by a single run, producing a mere 30 Reverse Delta. So I wondered: What’s the highest Reverse Delta over a three-game stretch between the same teams with a W-L-W requirement? A Double Reverse Delta? Sorry. Shiny squirrel. 

Tripp’s Nationals don’t go home empty-handed. Bronze.

So answering his question, depending on how we define Reverse Delta, the answer appears to be…

No.

Or…

Almost.

Or…

Yes, with your limitations and post-1900.

Which is how Baseball loves to answer our questions. We ask one innocent question and Baseball answers with 155 years of history full of glorious tangents.

Baseball never disappoints. What started as a search for a record became a treasure of stories. The first doubleheader. The biggest blowout. Forgotten franchises, one of which now shares a never-before-documented all-time record. 

Baseball fans of a certain age already know this feeling. Someone says, “You’ll never believe what happened,” and before long, you remember Rick Camp, an .060 hitter, in the 18th inning, down to the last strike, down a run and then hitting a delightfully frivolous home run because Baseball always says, “Not so fast.”

The numbers are the easy part. The stories of games covered by a single sentence, the teams you never heard of, the teams you thought you knew, the all-time great who never made the Hall of Fame. That’s what makes baseball timeless.

I sometimes think about Freddie Patek because he got an eight-year-old to look up from a box score and ask questions. I’ve been asking baseball questions ever since. They almost always start the same way. “I’ll bet that’s never happened before.” 

Baseball rarely answers with a simple yes or no. More often, it’s smiling, peering over the top of its bifocals and saying, “Kid, let me tell you a story.”

Fifty-five years after my father taught me to read a box score, I find myself wondering whether I’ll be around to watch Major League Baseball’s 500,000th game. I wonder whether my grandson will be sitting beside me imagining,

“I’ll bet that’s never happened before.”

It turns out Baseball has spent the last fifty-five years answering my questions. Usually with a smile. And occasionally by introducing me to a one-season club called the Elizabeth Resolutes.

“You can look it up.”  – Annie Savoy

Joseph Heinzmann has loved baseball since his Mets won the 1969 World Series and learned to read a box score a couple of years later. A criminal defense lawyer by profession, he has spent much of his life asking baseball questions that usually end with the discovery that, of course, it has happened before. He took his girlfriend to Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, getting there on a $29 People Express flight with face-value game tickets. She married him.

Jason David Córdova lives in Puerto Rico as an illustrator and painter. Some of his art can be seen on Instagram at @jasoni72. You can visit his shop on Red Bubble.

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