On Thursday evening, I attended my first Illinois baseball game of the year with fellow Illini fans Paul and Benson. It was a beautiful night for baseball in Champaign, as the Illini took on the Iowa Hawkeyes.
As you can see from the tweet, the game was very entertaining. Those six homers turned into eight by game's end. And they were all solo shots. Iowa took the game 6-5, so all but three runs came off solo home runs. One of the eight homers came off the bat of Iowa slugger Jake Adams, who is now tied for the NCAA top spot at 24. This was the final series of the season, as Illinois finished with a disappointing 23-28 record (9-15 Big 10). This will be the second consecutive year missing the Big 10 tournament (top eight qualify) after a historically good 2015 season (50-10, 21-1).
Back to the eight solo home runs, though. That seemed like a lot to me. I was curious, when's the last time a major league game had that many? The answer: June 21, 2016.
6/21/2016
18,187 fans witnessed history in Miami that night. Eight is the record in the National League. The MLB record, however, is 10 from the White Sox-Tigers game on May 28, 1995. That game had a record total of 12 homers, a figure that was tied in 2002 by the same two teams.
5/28/1995
The attendance for that game? 10,813. The 10 solo homers came from:
- Ray Durham (first career HR)
- Ron Karkovice (2)
- Craig Grebeck
- Frank Thomas
- Chad Curtis (2)
- Kirk Gibson (2)
- Lou Whitaker
The lineups from that game are fantastic. Kruk protecting the Big Hurt. Lou Whitaker, Alan Trammell, and Kirk Gibson were all 38-years-old.
Baseball is here! And more importantly, that means the over/under game is back. It seems as though everyone is an expert this time of year. Somehow we convince ourselves that we are better at predicting baseball outcomes than everyone else. Well, AFITB is putting that to the test for the third year in a row. Think you know more about baseball than us? You probably do. But go ahead and prove it anyway.