Eight Home Runs In One Game?

Diving into an old legend

Eight Home Runs In One Game?

The record for most home runs by a single player in a single game is supposedly 8.

That’s what you’ll see if you look at Baseball Reference, anyway:

That record seems to belong to Jay Clarke, who played for Corsicana in one of those little known iterations of the old Texas League way back in 1902.

The problem, of course, is trying to find proof that Clarke actually hit 8 home runs that day.

There’s an old Dallas Morning News article for 2001 about the situation that somebody kindly saved for posterity. You can read it on this website.

Of course, our ability to do newspaper research has improved greatly since 2001. Let’s take a look and see what we can figure out.

Now, the first thing to understand is that minor league baseball in 1902 was in an interesting transition state. The rise of the American League from minor league to major league status in 1901 had basically invalidated the old National Association. A new one rose in its place — but, of course, with two major leagues throwing money left and right at players, there wasn’t much by way of serious organization and order in 1902.

The old Texas League of 1902 was made up of the following teams:

• Corsicana

• Waco

• Dallas

• Fort Worth

• Paris

• Texarkana

And, on the day of June 16, 1902, right before the game started, the standings looked like this:

From The Fort Worth Record and Register, June 15, 1902, page 6

Corsicana was playing against Texarkana the day Clarke allegedly hit 8 home runs. Now, the two teams weren’t exactly evenly matched. In fact, Corsicana had completely run circles around Texarkana the day before:

From The Fort Worth Record and Register, June 15, 1902, page 6

Among other things, note that Corsicana was actually the home team, though it seems they chose to bat first. This was uncommon back in those days, but still did happen from time to time.

Now, it seems that the Sunday game on June 15, 1902 was played in Ennis, Texas, since Corsicana had blue laws that outlawed playing baseball on Sunday.

One thing that is clear from the original newspaper accounts is that Corsicana managed to hit about 20 home runs, and made at least 50 runs. But that’s where everything becomes hard to figure out.

This is how the Fort Worth newspaper reported it:

From The Fort Worth Register, June 16, 1902, page 3

Whether this was actually an “exhibition” game or not is not clear. I doubt it was, since it was listed as a regularly scheduled game in the newspapers the day before.

A Waco newspaper had a little bit more information, repeated the 20 home run claim, and noted that there were over 1,000 people in attendance:

From Waco Times-Herald, June 16, 1902, page 5

A newspaper in Waxahacie provided this brief account:

From The Waxahacie Daily Light, June 16, 1902, page 3

And then things become confusing.

A Houston newspaper, for example, seems to have missed the second digit from Corsicana’s score:

From The Houston Post, June 16, 1902, page 2

Meanwhile, a paper in Louisiana repeated the report of 51 runs, and also did not mention 8 home runs for Clarke:

From The Times-Democrat (New Orleans), June 16, 1902, page 5

Now, the newspaper world of 1902 wasn’t quite as well established as it would later be. However, word did travel around the minor league circuits. On June 17th we started to see other accounts of this game.

There was this up in Indiana:

From Lafayette Daily Courier, June 17, 1902, page 1

This was down in Arkansas:

From The Arkansas Gazette, June 17, 1902, page 5

This was in Birmingham, Alabama:

From The Birmingham Age-Herald, June 17, 1902, page 1

And so on. Of all the newspaper articles I’ve seen about this game from June 17, 1902, not a single one claims that Clarke hit eight home runs. Every one notes that he made eight runs and three home runs.

In fact, it seems that the actual record people were amazed at was 18 total bases, which, of course, is impossibly low if you hit eight home runs:

From Austin Daily Statesman, June 17, 1902, page 4

In fact, when the news finally hit the big eastern papers a little over a week after the game happened, the report was the same: 18 total bases, 3 home runs.

From New York Tribune, June 24, 1902, page 5

Notice, by the way, that the final score keeps increasing from one paper to the next.

Now, I’ve searched through all available newspapers from June 1902. I can’t find a single one from anywhere in the United States that claims that Clarke hit eight home runs in that single game.

I don’t know where this rumor started. I assumed that perhaps the number 3 was confused with the number 8. However, as you can see above, every one of these articles spells out the number 8.

I don’t know how this got mixed up. What I do know, however, is that Clarke did not hit 8 home runs in that game. He had 3.