With this week's American holiday, let's take a look back at some games from the last 10 years for which the opposing team was thankful for all the unearned runs they received as gifts.

I did a Team Pitching Game Finder, 2000-2009, where unearned runs were at least 1.5 times earned runs and then sorted first by earned runs scored and then overall number of runs scored:

This shows many of the games with high unearned run totals. Ideally, I'd like to be able to search for Runs minus Earned Runs to give us exactly the games with most unearned runs, but that function is not yet available. (It's on Sean's radar, I know, but so are many other improvements for the site.)

The game above that sticks out right away is #4 on the list, when the Orioles scored 10 earned runs plus another whopping 13 unearned runs to destroy the Blue Jays by a final score of 23-1. This game occurred very close to the end of the season and both teams were already out of playoff contention.

What a weird pitching line for the Blue Jays. Their starter was Chris Carpenter, now with the Cardinals. Carpenter was finishing up a pretty bad season and was less than 2 years away from a season-ending injury that cost him most of 2002 and all of 2003. He resurfaced with St. Louis in 2004, won the Cy Young in 2005, missed most of 2007-2008 and had another triumphant comeback season in 2009, finishing second in the Cy Young voting.

But check out who relieved Carpenter to try to stop the bleeding. It was none other than Roy Halladay, making his 3rd-to-last relief appearance (to date.) He had pitched to a 10.75 ERA over 67 innings to that point. He relieved Carpenter to start that 4th inning and pitched two-thirds of one of the most bizarre innings I've ever seen:

Brady Anderson walked. Jerry Hairston Jr. reached on an error on the second baseman. Delino DeShields flied out. Albert Belle hit an RBI single but the run was unearned due to the error. Chris Richard grounded out. That's two outs in the inning. Next, Halladay picked off Hairston at third base. However, based on the box score, it would appear Hairston got into a rundown and eventually scored on an error by the catcher. That's two unearned runs and now there would have been three outs if not for the errors. So by definition, any runs that score after this point are unearned.

Halladay then allowed 4 consecutive singles including two more unearned runs scoring. Lance Painter relieved Halladay and allowed a double, single, and a 3-run homer to DeShields. The way scoring rules work, the runs that Painter was responsible for are actually earned.

However, Halladay came out of that inning having pitched two-thirds of an inning, allowing 7 runs, but none earned. His seasonal ERA actually dropped from 10.75 down to 10.64, his final mark for the year. However, I'm sure that nobody was encouraged by his awful performance.

Anyway, the list above contains a bunch of unusual games like this one. Click on some box scores and check them out!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 7:18 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.