Here's a simple search looking at performances for any one team within a game.

First up, here are the top performances in terms of the most players getting exactly one hit. (As a reminder, game finder searches now utilize box scores from the years 1920-1939 and 1952-present., so those are the years covered here.)

The first two games on the list above have the further distinction that not only did 12 players get exactly one hit for their team but nobody else on the team got more than 1 hit. In other words, everybody got either 1 hit or no hits.

The topmost game, Mets-Cubs in 1977, is even more noteworthy because 4 Cubs got exactly one hit and no other Cubs got a hit.

I wonder if this is the highest combined total for two teams in a game. For starters, here are the 21 games that, across two teams, feature at least 17 different players getting exactly one hit:

By looking at the individual box scores, we can find that the record (at least for the years covered in this search) is in fact 18, in the 1983 Dodgers-Reds game (#5 on the list above) where 11 Dodgers and 7 Reds contributed exactly one hit each to the game total of 18.

Among the games with 17 players to get a hit, one of the (Oakland vs Texas in 1975) featured exactly 17 total hits.

All in all, this is not a particularly meaningful search. It's just the sort of thing that's pretty easy to do with the recent improvements to the Play Index.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 25th, 2010 at 8:49 am and is filed under Game Finders. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.