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!
In theory, a pitcher could win and lose the same game. With the new rule on rain-suspended games, this scenario is a little more likely.
Imagine a game between Red Sox and Yankees at Fenway. Yankees route Curt Schilling with a 5-run 4th. Clemens pitches first 3 for Yankees and gives up 2 runs. He is injured and replaced by Farnsworth, who pitches the 4th and 5th, giving up a run after the Sox loaded the bases in both innings. A deluge stops the game after the Yankees are scoreless in top of the 6th. Game is finished the next time Yankees come to town. Meanwhile, Yankees trade Clemens for Schilling, and Yankees call on Schilling to resume the game in bottom of the 6th. Schilling is set to lose the game because he gave up the go-ahead run. Clad in pin-stripes, Schilling proceeds to get the remaining 12 outs against the Sox in 4 perfect innings. So he gets the win for having by far the best results of the 3 Yankee pitchers.
Do you know if this has ever happened in real life?
ANSWER: Hi John,
Thanks for writing.
As far as I know, what you described could happen. If so, it would be possible for a pitcher to get both the loss and the win in the same game. He'd have to be traded from the losing team to the winning team (it couldn't happen the other way around though) with the Official Scorer credited him with the win as a relief pitcher after the starter didn't go 5 innings. This has never happened in Major League history.
More likely to happen though, would be a player playing for both teams as the result of a trade happening between a suspended game start and its completion. This however, has also never happened.
Why I'm not 100% sure though, is MLB Rule 3.03 about player substitutions:
"3.03 A player, or players, may be substituted during a game at any time the ball is dead. A substitute player shall bat in the replaced player’s position in the team’s batting order. A player once removed from a game shall not re-enter that game."
That last line makes no reference to the possibility of a player being traded before a suspended game is resumed. It says once out of the "game" he can't go back into that "game".
Best Wishes,
Geoff
---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------
QUESTION: Interesting point about Rule 3.03. I guess as a matter of "statutory construction," the reference to "shall bat in the replaced player's position in THE TEAMS'S batting order," the reference to "the teams" could support such a scenario. I remembered the puzzle vaguely from reading about such a hypothetical in "The Baseball Digest" (published in the 60s), and wanted to see if my recollection was accurate. I agree that the only way it could happen is a trade from the team that ultimately loses the game to the one that wins it.
I think a couple of times a player was traded between games of a doubleheader. That wouldn't present my hypothetical -- except maybe that a pitcher could win and lose both games of a doubleheader. That could happen even without a trade though. Perhaps it did way back in "the old days."
Answer Hi John,
Only 3 times in baseball history has a player played for two teams on the same day.
Back in 1922 Max Flack of the Cubs and Cliff Heathcote of the Cardinals were traded for each other between games of a double header.
More remarkably was what Joel Youngblood did on 8/4/1982. After playing a day game for the Mets in Chicago against the Cubs (and getting a hit off Fergie Jenkins), he was traded to the Expos who were scheduled to play a night game in Philadelphia. He flies to Philadelphia and gets a hit off Steve Carlton while playing for the Expos.
