Anything can happen in any given baseball game, but some things are rare; some are super-rare. Can you put these in order from rarest -> most frequent?
Try these two drag and drop quizzes. Warning these are really hard! If you don’t do so well, click retry and jiggle your answers! When done, expand Explanation below to see the results and the associated data.
P.S. Apologies to Larry Haney.
Game Rarities
There have been more than 236,000 major league baseball games. These events have occurred in less than .1% of those. Can you list these in order from rarest -> most frequent? Drag the event to your frequency guess.
Inning Rarities
There have been over 4.1 million innings played in major league baseball. These events have occurred less than .025% of the time. Can you list these in order from rarest -> most frequent? Drag the event to your frequency guess.
Are you done? Warning – expanding below will reveal the answers.
Explanation
Game Rarities
Congrats if you got these right – these counts are really close.
The rarest occurrence is four homers in a game by one player. This has only happened 18 times! If you swag 10 players get four at bats every game, that means 2.3 million possible hitters and only 18 of them accomplished this.
The second rarest is perfect game, with 23 times. I’ve never even seen a major league no-hitter. Closest to a no-hitter for me was Zack Greinke at 8 1/3rd innings.
The third rarest is 18 or more strikeouts in a nine inning game (one pitcher) at 26 times. Lots of the usual suspects here (Nolan Ryan, Sandy Koufax, Randy Johnson) but also some surprises.
By comparison, the most frequent, hit for the cycle, has happened a whopping 338 times. Or roughly “a couple of times a year”.
Inning Rarities
This had two clear cut leaders and two that had very close counts.
The rarest of all is the unassisted triple play at 15 times. 4.1 million innings and it’s happened 15 times!
The second rarest occurrence is one player steals second, third and home in the same inning at 54 times. This is kind of a dead-ball era occurrence: Honus Wagner did it four times, Ty Cobb did it three times, Lou Brock and Rickey Henderson never did it. The last two to do it were Jon Berti (2020) and Mallex Smith (2019) – which you could have given me an infinite amount of guesses…
The last two are very close. The third rarest occurrence is four strikeouts in a half inning (meaning one batter got to first due to a passed ball or wild pitch). This has occurred 100 times on the noggin. Fun fact: five strikeouts in a half inning has never happened in a major league game.
Last, but very close, is immaculate Inning (nine pitches, three strikeouts) with 109 times. The term “immaculate inning” wasn’t even coined until around 2000!
