Editor’s note: This is a bonus Weird and Wild. To read the main W&W column, click or tap here.You know what happens in baseball when there’s a three-week break between Weird and Wild columns? Weirdness happens. Wildness happens. Games you can’t believe happen. Because you need to know about these games, here are a few we definitely need to bring back to life.
Orioles 9, Rays 7 in 13 zany innings (Monday) How bizarre was this game? The Orioles trailed in the 11th, 12th and 13th innings … and they won — on Colton Cowser’s first walk-off home run since, um, the day before.But what do you think? Does it seem hard to win a game in which the team you’re playing is winning in the 11th, 12th and 13th? I hope you answered yes. I posed that question to Baseball Reference’s ever-resourceful Katie Sharp. And she found only one other game like it in the entire Baseball Reference/Retrosheet play-by-play database.That one was a nutty 7-6 win by Hubie Brooks’ 1988 Expos over Mark Grant’s ’88 Padres, in another 13-inning classic, back in the ol’ pre-Zombie Runner era. But I still think Monday’s game was nuttier.That’s because, in this tilt, there were two extra innings in which both teams scored at least two runs apiece. And yep, I know that’s Zombie-aided. Nevertheless, Zombies or no Zombies, that has happened only three other times in the last 84 years!Mets 16, Nationals 7 in 12 goofy innings (May 18) How’d this one make our list? Ho-ho-ho. You’ll see.For one thing, the Mets’ 10-run 12th inning made them the first National League team to score 10 or more in an extra inning since Ivey Wingo’s 1919 Reds did that in Brooklyn on May 15, 1919. But guess what? That wasn’t even the weird and wild part.The weird and wild part featured the Nationals scoring in the seventh, the eighth and in two extra innings of this game … and they still lost by nine runs! Shouldn’t that be impossible?I was pretty sure it was. So I dumped yet another crazed research project in the lap of my friend, Katie Sharp. She combed through the Baseball Reference database, which contains nearly every game since 1910, and found (yep) exactly zero other games in which a team scored in at least four innings from the seventh on — and still lost by nine.The previous record for biggest loss like that was set by Sparky Adams’ 1929 Pirates, who put runs on the board in the seventh, eighth, ninth, 11th and 13th innings of a June 15 game with Shanty Hogan’s New York Giants … but still lost by five — which was possibly related to those 20 runs they coughed up that day.
