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10/2/20
Forbes Field
Pittsburgh vs Cincinnati
Cincinnati won the 1st game....
13-4
Cincinnati also won the 2nd game....
7-3
Pittsburgh won the 3rd game....
6-0
More info....
A contemptuous rain threatened to prematurely end the 1920 baseball season. With just a few regular season games remaining, precipitation had washed out all games in both leagues on September 30 and a few more on October 1. Playing their last four games was important to Pittsburgh, for if they had won them all, and Cincinnati had lost theirs, the Pirates, rather than the Reds, would have finished third. In 1920, the first three teams shared in World Series money.
As fate would have it, the Reds were in Pittsburgh at the time, probably hoping the rain would continue right through to the start of the World Series. They were in third place, 3.5 games ahead of the Pirates.
The Pirates, on the other hand, wanted desperately to play the entire scheduled series with the Reds. When both the September 30 and October 1 games were postponed, Pittsburgh owner Barney Dreyfuss sought special permission from league president John A. Heydler to play a tripleheader on October 2, at Forbes Field. Heydler consented. Playing three games in one day was not without precedent as Brooklyn had hosted Pittsburgh for three on September 1, 1890; and on September 7, 1896, Baltimore and Louisville clashed thrice. Nor was Dreyfuss鈥?expectation of a sweep unrealistic. In the aforementioned tripleheaders, both Brooklyn and Baltimore swept their opponents.
The first game started at noon, in front of just a few hundred patrons. As the day wore on, however, thousands more made their way into the park. Although the temperatures were frigid, this was to be the last major league ball played in Pittsburgh in 1920. Pirate ace, Wilbur Cooper, pitched the first game. Wilbur was shooting for his 25th victory of the campaign, but the Reds jumped all over him for ten hits and eight runs in just over two innings. Cincinnati won in a landslide, 13-4, clinching third place. With both clubs then sapped of any incentive, the second and third games took on a farcical nature.
Game two saw multiple players manning alien fielding positions. Cincinnati backstop Ivy Wingo started at second base, and pitchers Rube Bressler, Dutch Ruether, Fritz Coumbe and Hod Eller saw action in right field, first base, center field and second base respectively. The Reds also prevailed in the second game, 7-3.
The third game witnessed still more shenanigans. Again, Wingo started at second base, pitchers Bressler in center, Eller at first, and Coumbe in right field. Mercifully, at 6 p.m., umpire Harrison called the game after six innings because of darkness. Pittsburgh finally won one, 6-0, snapping their day鈥檚 two-game losing streak.
There were no obvious heroes this day although five players appeared in all three games-Barnhart, Tierney and Nicholson of the Pirates; Duncan and Rath of the Reds. Rookie Clyde Barnhart, who had made his major league debut just ten days earlier, does remain, however, the only player in modern baseball history to produce a three-game hitting streak in the course of a single afternoon. And, as if playing a tripleheader wasn鈥檛 enough, that night the Pirates boarded a train to Chicago where they played the Cubs the following day in their season finale.
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