Royals’ historical feat Monday was first done by a Kansas City team in 1889
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- Royals scored in every inning in a 15-1 win over the Phillies.
- A Kansas City team scored in every inning on May 20, 1889 (Cowboys).
- The 1889 Association Park game featured Billy Hamilton and an 18-12 KC win.
Maybe the Royals need to schedule more Monday afternoon games going forward.
Thanks to the World Cup being in Kansas City, the Royals-Phillies series wrapped up Monday, which is an unusual getaway day in baseball.
The Royals thumped the Phillies 15-1 at Kauffman Stadium, and scored in every inning, a rare feat that had been done 21 times since 1900, according to an MLB story. The Royals also scored in every inning on Sept. 14, 1998 (15-6 win over the A’s), according to Baseball Reference’s Jessica Brand, who noted it was the third time a KC team did it.
The other came during the Benjamin Harrison presidency.
On May 20, 1889, the Kansas City Cowboys thumped the Brooklyn Bridegrooms 18-12 at Association Park in KC. At that time, the home team batted first and so the Cowboys scored in all nine innings in the American Association game.
4, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 6, 1
“Chippy” McGarr, Jim Manning and “Sliding” Billy Hamilton were among the starting nine that day for the Cowboys. Hamilton stole 111 bases that season, and had 914 in his career. He is in the Baseball Hall of Fame thanks to that and his career .344 batting average.
While John McCarty, who was born in 1867 in Independence, did not have his best game on the mound, he did make sure the team had at least one run in every frame.
“As they scored inning after inning, the interest centered in whether they would score in every inning of the game,” the Kansas City Journal wrote. “In the ninth inning, McGarr the first batter, went out, it looked like they might be blanked, but Manning came to the rescue with a drive to left, stole second, went to third on Smith’s muff of a thrown ball and scored, amid great cheering, on McCarty’s sacrifice fly to right.”
The Bridgegrooms’ battery of pitcher Mickey Hughes and catcher Joe Visner, had a rough day. Hughes had been a Brooklyn mainstay a year earlier when he had a 25-13 record with a 2.13 ERA and threw a complete game in all 40 starts.
The Brooklyn Eagle was unkind in its story.
“The Kansas City team hit Hughes’ pitching from the start to finish,” it wrote. “Brooklyn did enough hitting to win a dozen games, but were sadly handicapped by Hughes’ poor work. He was wild, and when he did get the ball over the plate it was lined out. Visner gave him poor support, throwing badly and having numerous passed balls. The Kansas Citys began pounding his balls at the start, and in no inning did they fail to get both hits and runs. In the eighth inning, Hughes was plain crazy, and five singles, a double, a sacrifice and one base on balls produced six runs. The eight fielding errors and six passed balls scored against the Brooklyns contributed somewhat to the disaster.”
KC’s stadium was a ‘Hole’
Apparently, the playing conditions at Association Park field were not great that day. That’s no surprise since the stadium’s nickname was “The Hole,” as Flatland KC noted.
“The grassless playing surface, located about 10 feet below street level, proved sufficiently stifling that ballplayers poured water on their shoes between innings,” Flatland wrote.
The website Clio noted “the street boundaries of the ballpark were from Lydia Avenue (east, first base) to Sixth Street (south, third base) to John Street and Tracy Avenue (west, left field) to and Independence Avenue (north, right field). The infield of the former ballpark is now the home of the Al-Taqwa Islamic Center.”
But heat wasn’t the issue that day.
“The grounds were in a horrible condition from the recent rains out there, and first-class ball playing could hardly have been expected,” Times Union reported.
MLB ballparks don’t face such issues in 2026, thanks to the fine groundskeepers and improvements made to deal with heavy rainfall.
However, complaints about the umpires continue to this day, and that was the case 137 years ago.
“The least said about the umpiring the better,” the Kansas City Journal wrote. “It was rotten, rotten, rotten. In the third inning, Hamilton hit a slow ball towards second base, which he certainly beat out by ten feet, but Goldsmith cooly called him out. He is the worst excuse for an umpire ever seen in Kansas City and has absolutely no judgement (sic) on balls and strikes.”
