A Brief History of Short Baseball Games

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Photo by Dirk Hansen via Wikimedia Commons

Adam Wainwright

Adam Wainwright pitching for the St. Louis Cardinals in 2012.

Most people probably don’t remember where they were on April 16, 2004, but if they were at that night’s Brewers game then they probably didn’t stay long.

On that Friday night 19 years ago, the Brewers were visiting the Astros in Houston, but they left their bats at home. They managed just three hits (Scott Podsednik had two of them) against Roy Oswalt, who pitched a complete game shutout in a 2-0 victory. The game featured just one pitching change (which happened between innings) and was over in one hour and 58 minutes, which feels like it might be the last game of its kind.

The Brewers have played 3,010 games since that day and they’ve logged at least two hours of baseball in every one of them. It’s the longest such streak in known MLB history by a wide margin: The second longest streak belongs to the 1990-2003 Yankees and is nearly 1,000 games shorter. The Brewers’ streak is also nearly twice as long as the next longest active streak, the Astros’ 1651 games.

The streak almost ended later the same year it began, as the Brewers and Cubs played a 2:05 matinee at Wrigley Field in July. Thousands of games later, however, it survived another challenge when the Brewers and Rays played a 2:06 game on Friday night. The streak has survived rain-shortened games, like this day in 2016 where the Brewers and Twins only played six innings but needed 2:21 to do it anyway, and it survived 14 seven-inning doubleheader games during the brief stretch where MLB abbreviated twin bills in 2020 and 2021. Now, for at least two months, it’s also survived the pitch clock era.

What follows is a brief look at the Brewers’ shortest games during the streak, which is now coming up on 20 years:

1 (and 2): Sept. 16, 2020 vs St. Louis

The abbreviated 2020 season started off poorly for the Cardinals, who lost three of their first five games before experiencing a COVID outbreak in their clubhouse that shut the team down for 16 days. When they resumed play on Aug. 15 of that year, they still had 53 games to play in a span of just 44 days. They played ten doubleheaders over that span, including a September visit to Milwaukee where they played five games in three days. This doubleheader was the fourth and fifth game in that span.

Adam Wainwright and Brandon Woodruff took over in game one, each pitching (seven inning) complete games in a 4-2 Cardinals victory. The two of them combined to allow eleven hits but walked just one batter, as 29 of the 53 batters to come to the plate faced three pitches or less.

The Brewers got revenge in the nightcap, scoring four runs in the bottom of the first inning and turning things over to rapid-fire starter Brent Suter and three relievers, who held on for a 6-0 win. There were just nine hits and five walks in the six and a half innings of play (the Brewers didn’t need the bottom of the seventh), and there was only one mid-inning pitching change.

Despite that rapid pace of play and the abbreviated contests, however, the streak survived. Both games were played in exactly two hours and one minute.

3: May 6, 2011 @ St. Louis

This time the Brewers were likely the weary team, as a group that would go on to win the NL Central was enduring a rough stretch to start the season. When they came to Busch Stadium on a Friday night, they were 13-18 on the season and 1-6 on the first two legs of a three-city road trip, where they had just lost all four contests in Atlanta. 

What followed was one of the most lackluster offensive performances in franchise history, as they managed just two hits and a walk against Cardinals’ pitcher Jaime Garcia. Neither team had an at-bat go longer than seven pitches in the game, and the two clubs combined to use just three pitchers. The Brewers went quietly in just two hours and two minutes but bounced back to go 83-47 the rest of the season and clinch their first division title in almost three decades.

4: Sept. 6, 2006 vs Los Angeles

The Dodgers wrapped up a three-game series in Milwaukee with a lot on the line, but also with cause to hurry: They entered the evening contest with a one-game lead in the NL West (a lead they would eventually lose), but they also needed to get to New York to play the Mets the next day. They sent Derek Lowe to the mound, and he pitched like someone who had a plane to catch, completing eight innings while throwing just 79 pitches. Chris Capuano also worked eight innings for the Brewers and wasn’t as efficient or effective, allowing a pair of runs as the Dodgers won 2-1.

There were 18 nine-inning games during the 2006 season that ended in under two hours, but this wasn’t one of them: The Brewers and Dodgers just got over the line at 2:04.

5 (tie):

• July 17, 2004 at Chicago. Greg Maddux worked fast and was efficient in this one, pitching a complete game shutout in a 2:05, 5-0 win over the Crew on a Saturday afternoon at Wrigley Field.
• May 7, 2005 vs Washington. Four pitchers combined to throw just 210 pitches across eight and a half innings of baseball and Geoff Jenkins supplied all the offense, hitting a 3-run home run in a 3-0 victory that lasted two hours and five minutes.
• June 29, 2008 at Minnesota. The Brewers and Twins wrapped up their annual interleague rivalry series with a quick Sunday matinee, as Kevin Slowey held the Brewers to just three hits and outdueled Ben Sheets in a 5-0 victory in another 2:05 game.
• September 7, 2011 at St. Louis. In a game best remembered for an incident involving Nyjer Morgan, the Brewers and Cardinals otherwise took care of business quickly. Zack Greinke and Chris Carpenter combined to pitch 16 innings with Carpenter coming out on top, pitching a complete game shutout in a 2-0 win. 16 of the game’s 63 batters saw just one pitch, but the ninth inning drama extended the contest to 2:05.