About Geoff Expertise Huge baseball trivia lover! I will attempt to answer anything you can think of when it comes to major league baseball. I have a large reference library of all things baseball. Try to stump me!
Question Has anyone ever made all three offensive outs in the same half inning?
Answer Hi Ed,
Thanks for writing.
It's a great question! Unfortunately the answer is either:
"Yes" or
"Probably not, but no one knows for sure"
The reason why the answer could be "Yes" is that any time a batter hits into a triple play he has in fact accounted for all three of his teams outs. This has happened many times. Similarly, if a batter makes an out and then later in the same inning hits into a double play he accounted for all three outs. This I'm sure, has also happened.
I suspect though that what you are asking is if anyone has ever come to the plate 3 times in one inning, and each time made 1 out.
Unfortunately, although we know how often a batter has come up 3 times in the same inning (it's only happened 28 times in baseball history, and 11 of those times were pre-1900) we don't have complete data on what happened in those innings. Even box scores will only tell us that so-and-so went 2-for-8 in the game. We can determine if he batted 3 times in the 3rd inning, but we don't know if either of his hits happened in the 3rd inning or not.
For the data we do have, no one has ever come to the plate three times in one inning making one out each time up.
