@yerfriendmolly got curious about a weird baseball statistics question so I went digging and found the single worst extra-innings loss in the history of baseball: the texas rangers beating the oakland athletics 16-4 in the 15th inning on july 3, 1983
trying to imagine what the mood was like in oakland coliseum in the bottom of the 15th and that must've been fucking indescribable
edit to attempt to explain why this result is so weird for non-baseball people after the fold
okay, so, first of all, you literally can't win a game in extra innings by more than 4 if you're the home team -- the most runs you can score on one play is 4, and once you score the go-ahead run in an extra inning as the home team, the game ends immediately because the other team doesn't get to bat again.
second, you can only score as many runs as batters who come up to bat and make it on base -- so after a game that went 14 innings tied, it got busted wide open, and the pitcher faced 15 batters and only retired 3 of them. there's only 9 players on a baseball team. that's a lot of fucking up in a small span of time.
and the reason the mood would be so weird is because the athletics could've theoretically still come from behind in the bottom of the 15th, but scoring 12+ runs in one inning is pretty stupidly rare in general. I've seen thousands of innings of baseball in my life, between TV and in person, and I've seen it happen like twice. everyone except the most diehard oakland fans would've left immediately instead of waiting to see them play half an inning of baseball that was 99.9% likely to be completely meaningless.
