Three games, one ticket, five hours: the only true tripleheader in major-league history

On the afternoon of 2 October 1920, the Cincinnati Reds and the Pittsburgh Pirates played three baseball games at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, and a single ticket admitted the crowd to all three. 12 Cincinnati won the first two, 13–4 and 7–3. Pittsburgh took the third 6–0 after six innings, when the light gave out. 13

Playing time for the three games came to exactly five hours — 2:03, 1:56 and 1:01 — with a scheduled ten-minute break between each of them. 1 Two umpires, Pete Harrison and Hank O'Day, worked every inning of all three; Harrison stayed behind the plate throughout. 1

Major-league baseball has played a tripleheader three times, in 1890, 1896 and 1920, and the Society for American Baseball Research treats the 1920 afternoon as the only true one. 1

Third place in the National League paid the club a share of the World Series gate; fourth place paid nothing. 1 Going into that Saturday the Reds stood 80–69 in third and the Pirates 77–73 in fourth, four games left each, and rain had already washed out the games scheduled for 30 September and 1 October. 1 Cincinnati arrived as the reigning world champions, the club that had won the 1919 World Series. 1

Barney Dreyfuss, who owned the Pirates, proposed clearing the backlog with three games in one afternoon starting at noon. John Heydler, the league president, agreed. The Reds' manager, Pat Moran, had refused the idea, and Heydler wired him to play. 1 Pittsburgh had to sweep all three to have any chance at third. "One defeat this afternoon will kill the Buccos' chances," the Pittsburgh Press told its readers that morning. 1

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Charles J. Doyle made the offer sound like a bargain: "Come early and bring your lunch. The big show begins at 12 o'clock and will continue for five or six hours. All for one price of admission, folks, and the sideshow thrown in." 1

Pittsburgh started its ace, the left-hander Wilbur Cooper, who came into the game at 24–14 with a 2.25 earned run average. Cooper was gone with one out in the third inning, having given up ten hits. 14 Cincinnati's Ray Fisher pitched a complete game, allowing four runs, one of them earned. 4 The Reds stole seven bases, three of them by left fielder Pat Duncan, and every Cincinnati starter had at least one hit. 1 The first game took 2:03. 4

That result settled third place before the second game began, so the rest of the afternoon was played for the gate and the record. Cincinnati's Dutch Ruether played first base, Hod Eller played second base and then first, and Fritz Coumbe played centre field — three pitchers sent out to field while other men did the pitching. 1 Both starters went the distance anyway: Lynn Brenton for Cincinnati, Jimmy Zinn for Pittsburgh. 1 Seven Cincinnati runs in the seventh inning decided it, 7–3, in 1:56. 5

Pittsburgh's Johnny Morrison, pitching in only his second major-league game, held Cincinnati to four hits over six innings. 1 The umpires called the third game at six o'clock for darkness with the Pirates ahead 6–0, one hour and one minute after it started. 3 Zinn, who had started on the mound in the second game, finished the afternoon in right field. 1

Five men played in all three games: Cotton Tierney, Fred Nicholson and Clyde Barnhart for Pittsburgh, Morrie Rath and Pat Duncan for Cincinnati. 1 Four future Hall of Fame players took part — Max Carey, Pie Traynor and Billy Southworth for the Pirates, Edd Roush for the Reds — and so did Hank O'Day, the umpire. 1

The 1890 and 1896 tripleheaders, Brooklyn against Pittsburgh and Baltimore against Louisville, each began with a morning game that sold its own ticket. SABR's reading of those two days is a morning game and then a doubleheader, which leaves the 1920 afternoon as the only tripleheader a single admission ever bought. 1

The 24 innings played at Forbes Field that Saturday were still three fewer than the Pirates and the Chicago Cubs had played there on 28 June 1916, when Pittsburgh won 3–2 and then won 3–2 again in eighteen innings. 1 Today a tripleheader is allowed only when the first game is the completion of a suspended game from an earlier date. 2 An average nine-inning major-league game lasted 2:36 in 2024, the shortest figure since 1984. 6

The crowd has more than one figure attached to it. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette counted "about 8,000 fans" during the afternoon and noted that "less than half of this number were present when the flitting shadows played." Retrosheet's box score for the third game records an attendance of 9,000. 13

SABR's count of one true tripleheader sits alongside the standard list of three, from 1890, 1896 and 1920. 2 The record for games in a day belongs further down the professional ladder: in 1899 the New England League's Manchester Manchesters and Portland Phenoms played six games in one day, starting at nine in the morning. Manchester won all six to clinch a division title, and league officials later ruled that only two of those wins counted, returning the second-half championship to Newport. 1

Cincinnati's reward for third place came to $10,744.14, its share of the World Series gate. 1 The Reds finished the season 82–71 and the Pirates 79–75. 7 Doyle, who had promised his readers a bargain, filed his verdict the next morning: "All in all, it was a very exciting afternoon — but the day proved that too much is too much." 1