Unassisted triple plays

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Posted By: Scott S

While looking at the back of the T-205 Neal Ball card, I noticed it states "in 1909, July 19 he accomplished the rare feat of making an unassisted triple play, one of the five recorded in base ball history."

My understanding (and as seen on the SABR link below) is that Ball was the first to record an unassisted triple play, and the next one didn't happen until 1920.

http://tripleplays.sabr.org/tp_utp.htm

I'm wonderng if there was a rule change or anything else which might be why the T205 states there were five of them, or was this just a mistake?

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Posted By: MVSNYC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unassisted_triple_play


gotta love wikipedia...


the back of the T205 was wrong.


p.s. what's cool is...they all "Caught line drive, touched 2nd, tagged runner." not all in that order, tho.

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Posted By: ali_lapoint

i was at yankee stadium and saw randy velarde's unassisted triple play. second most amazing thing i've ever witnessed next to david cone's perfect game.

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Posted By: Scott S

Thanks Mike... appreciate the input. I assumed the card text was incorrect, but wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something.

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Posted By: John S

Wamby

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Posted By: Mark Evans

The thing that has always fascinated me about unassisted triple plays is that, while only 14 have been performed since 1876, two were performed on consecutive days (1927) and then only one during the next 65 years. I guess this reflects them to be "random" events, but since I had to take Statistics twice, as with a lot of things, I could be wrong. Mark

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Posted By: Dave Hornish

...is how Unassisted Triple Plays and Perfect Games roughly relate, as do Cycles and No Hitters. 14 UTP's vs 17 Perfect Games, 277 Cycles vs. 256 No Hitters in MLB History. The chances are very small the latter pair will occur and miniscule in the case of the former.

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Posted By: J Levine

Without doing some research, the back of the Ball card could be correct. It does not say major league baseball only. I know that there were triple plays turned in the PCL, AA, NA, Union, IL, etc. Not sure of the specifics but it is possible that 4 previous ones could have happened.

Joshua

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Posted By: Rhys

I would bet anything the card is right, but like Joshua said, it probably takes what we consider to be minor leagues into account. For example, I have some newspaper accounts of when Roy Castleton pitched a perfect game in 1905 for Youngstown. It makes mention about how it was the third in baseball history and how it was better than Cy Youngs. It does not differenciate one bit that it was a "minor league" accomplishment. That is just how they looked at it 100 years ago when there was no such as designated major and minor leagues, just amatuer and professionalism. I am sure there were 4 other documented occuranced they could point to back then when they did their write ups.

Rhys Yeakley

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Posted By: john/z28jd

Could it be that the person who did the write-ups for the cards actually turned the first 4 himself in backyard baseball games? Just a thought

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Posted By: Alan U

Edited for wrong post