Say it’s the 7th inning and your team, the KC Royals has suddently gone into a nosedive with the pitching.
Your starting pitcher has blown a 5 run lead and his arm is now useless. So you bring in the next stiff up to the mound and he throws his arm out. Every members of your pitching staff either injures himself or is pulled due to awful performance. So the score is now 35 - 5 and you’re still in the 7th inning. You have no more pitchers left. What happens? Do you go to your regular line up? Are you able to throw in the towel at all?
Well, forfeits are possible, but awfully rare in modern Major League Baseball, and unprecedented for this reason. Pitching appearances by non-pitchers are in fact much more common. Just last month,
Do you mean running out of pitchers or not enough players to field a team or just forfeits in general? At any rate, here’s a list of all the forfeits recorded in baseball since 1871. There are a few with teams not showing up or leaving early. There’s one (8/1/1883, Boston at Cleveland) with the pitcher being worn down and replaced by another pitcher, who was not on the grounds when the game started, so they forfeited. Nothing exactly like the OP, though.
It should be noted that after he pitched, Lopez wound up on the Disabled List for 15 days with a strained elbow, which is why you don’t see this done more often than it is.
Many teams will have an “everyday player” (i.e., a non-pitcher) who is reasonable enough at pitching that they can put him in there to finish up pitching in a blowout, just so that they don’t completely blow up their bullpen in a hopeless game. That’s how you see the Doug Dascenzos of the world getting a few innings as pitchers.
One of baseball’s unwritten rules is that in a blowout situation the team that is ahead will ease up a little. When a position player is pitching, the opposing players will still try to get hits but they won’t do things like steal bases and foul off lots of pitches.
The funny thing was how horrible Lopez was and how competent Mather was. Usually teams have their emergency relievers picked out well ahead of time. Nick Swisher was quite good last season for the Yankees, and of course Wade Boggs was an excellent knuckleballer, but Lopez couldn’t get his rainbow anywhere near the plate most of the time.
I’m also reminded about the time Jose Canseco pitched. Was that because they ran out of pitchers as well or was he given a chance to fulfill a wish of his?
There was also the 2002 All-Star Game, which was called after 11 innings with the score tied because both teams had used all their pitchers. Of course, the All-Star Game is an exhibition that doesn’t count in the standings.
Yeah, I was wondering why Ace said that. The reason Lopez didn’t pitch another inning was because his elbow was bothering him (IIRC it wasn’t quite right even before the game, but he hadn’t told anybody that there was anything wrong before he was called on to pitch that one inning), not because he wasn’t effective.
I was rather surprised that my wife agreed to stick it out, especially after she told me she was starving in the 11th (concessions do not remain open in extra inning games). When I offered to leave after the 15th, she shrugged and said “we’ve made it this long, why not stay?”