Quote:
Originally Posted by Cliff Bowman
Aha, wasn’t his name O’Keefe?
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Close enough. Between June 23 and August 10, 1888
Tim Keefe won 19 straight games in the same season.
During his stretch of 19 straight wins, Keefe allowed just 50 runs; the Giants scored 111. His record was snapped against the Cubs, when he allowed just 2 earned runs in a 4-2 loss. The crowd on hand to watch Keefe try for 20 straight included some of the city’s rich and famous. Among them were the cast of McCaull’s Light Opera Company, including Colonel McCaull and such headliners as DeWolf Hopper, Mathilde Cottrelly, and Marion Manola. The next morning the New York Times reported that about 80 members of the opera company “came up to the game in large horse drawn tally-ho coaches, and kept cheering the New-Yorks from start to finish” despite the Chicago victory.
Even in defeat, the Light Opera Company honored an invitation it had extended the day before to host both teams to their performance of Prince Methusalem that evening.
In formal attire, the members of both teams arrived at Wallack’s Theatre to the cheers of those outside and inside. But the evening’s highlight was still yet to come. During the intermission of Prince Methusalem, Hopper strode to the center of the stage. After much applause for his performance up to that point, he began a recitation of a poem that had never been heard publicly before. The audience was in a state of rapture. When Hopper finished, the place went wild with cheering. Tim Keefe’s incredible streak of 19 straight victories ended on the afternoon of August 14, 1888, but DeWolf Hopper’s streak—reciting “
Casey at The Bat” well into the next century (10,000-15,000 times by his estimate)—had just begun.
Like Keefe, Rube Marquard lost his bid for a 20th win when his Giants faced the Cubs.
A third Giant, Carl Hubbell established the consecutive wins streak at 24, when he started out 8-0 in 1937, to go along with the 16 games he won in a row at the end of 1936.