[barrysloate]

We often discuss the difficulty of comparing one era of baseball records to that of another, since circumstances change drastically over time. One of those eras whose records were always suspect to me were those recorded between 1942 and 1945, when so many key major leaguers were lost to the war. And there is a particular game that made me think of this.

I recently looked up a boxscore on Retrosheet that is clearly one of the oddest major league games ever played. On April 30, 1944, the New York Giants beat the Brooklyn Dodgers 26 to 8. Not only did the Giants batters receive 17 walks, but two of their players- Phil Weintraub and Ernie Lombardi- combined for 18 RBI's! While HOFer Lombardi's 7 seems feasible, Weintraub's 11 makes absolutely no sense. Here is a player who had a short and unremarkable career having one of the most prodigious games in history! Could that have happened in a non-wartime year? I would say it would have been nearly impossible.

This game aside, how do baseball historians assess these seasons, and how legitimate are the records?