7/18/2011:
There’s nothing like a July night spent eating peanuts and Cracker Jack, root root rooting for the home team. Watching baseball is a favorite pastime for millions across America. North Dakota may not have a major league team, but its baseball history is filled with unique events. Teams were integrated long before the Major Leagues, and it was done with little trouble. And it’s the home state of Roger Maris, who broke Babe Ruth’s home run record. And we’ve been creating world records for a long time.
On today’s date in 1891, spectators in Devil’s Lake witnessed a very unusual ballgame between Grand Forks and Fargo. It had to go into extra innings…sixteen extra innings to be exact, and if you’ve done the math, then you already realize that the game was twenty-five innings long. And that’s not all. The Grand Forks Herald reported the next day that the play by both teams was “unusually fine,” and that’s because neither team allowed a run. That’s right, the game went on for twenty-five innings and neither team ever scored. It was forced to end after four hours because players had to catch their trains home.
The teams were also mirror images of each other as far as plays go: both pitchers struck out eighteen players, one second basemen had nineteen chances without an error and the other was seventeen out of eighteen. There was only one fly ball to the outfield that fell for a hit the entire game. It was, as the Grand Forks Herald reported the next day, a “Phenomenal Game,” setting the world record for the most innings without any runs.
Even though there wasn’t a league in 1891, North Dakota’s baseball teams were semi-professional, part of a small group of teams from North Dakota and Minnesota that played benefit games for local charities and brought baseball to small communities that loved to come out and watch.
Dakota Datebook written by Leewana Thomas
Sources:
Grand Forks Herald, July 19th 1891
http://www.statehistoricalfoundation.com/?id=81&offset=200
http://www.pitchblackbaseball.com/northdakotabaseball.html
http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/m/marisro01.shtml?redir