There is only one thing that former Pittsburgh Pirate Rennie Stennett and former Brooklyn Dodgers manager Wilbert Robinson have in common. In the 136 years of Major League baseball they are the only two players who cracked seven hits in a nine-inning game.
Just recently Josh Hamilton became the 16th player to club four home runs in a game. While laudable the Texas Rangers’ feat is far more common than the record shared by Stennett and Robinson. It’s not even terribly common that players come to the plate seven times in a nine-inning game.
There have been more perfect games thrown. There have been more unassisted triple plays. Considering the magnitude of the accomplishment, the record is not widely discussed, nor widely known. Yet if any baseball fan hears of the record there is definitely a wow factor.
Robinson was a player for the original Baltimore Orioles, long before the Orioles as we know them came into existence in the 1950s as the transferred St. Louis Browns. Robinson, a Hall of Famer, is better known for his tenure as the field leader of the Dodgers when he was nicknamed “Uncle Robbie.”
After his playing days, Robinson became a coach for the New York Giants and then in 1914 he became manager of the Dodgers, the National League club he led between that year and 1931 won 1,397 games and lost 1,395. He won pennants in 1916 and 1920 with that team. For a time, in deference to his stature, the Brooklyn team was called the “Robins.” They were, at times, also known as “the Daffiness boys” partially due to Robinson’s personality.
However, Robinson’s outstanding batting performance occurred on June 19, 1892 when he went seven-for-seven in a 25-4 victory over St. Louis. Robinson banged out six singles and one double. Some of his teammates of that era were John McGraw, later the astoundingly successful manager of the New York Giants, and Hughie Jennings. On his big day, Robinson also gathered 11 RBIs.
Stennett was a second baseman in the 1970s and like Robinson on the day he tied the record, Sept. 16, 1975, he was also the beneficiary of his team massacring an opponent so he could come to the plate frequently. That day the Pirates destroyed the Chicago Cubs, 22-0.
Stennett stroked a triple, two doubles and four singles, and equaled another record by twice getting two hits in an inning in the same game. He did so in the first and fifth innings.
For sure, Robinson had never heard of Stennett, since he was long-dead by the time Stennett got around to tying his hits mark, and Stennett had not heard of Robinson, either, until circumstances brought his name into the conversation after his own stunning performance.
“I knew somebody had six hits,” Stennett said of what he believed the record to be. “But I didn’t know who. I didn’t know whether anybody else had seven hits or not. I never even heard of Wilbert Robinson until after the game.”
Stennett was not alone in his ignorance about the man to whom his own name has been linked for 37 years now. None of his Pirates teammates knew about Uncle Robbie, either. However, then-Pirates manager Danny Murtaugh knew who Robinson was and he also related a story he had picked up about the old-timer.
“I heard that when Uncle Robbie was managing,” Murtaugh said, “whenever any of his players got six hits, he took him out of the game.”
That sounds like fiction because Robinson may never have had a player who came that close to his record.
Meanwhile, Stennett called his own seven-hit game “lucky” and said that he was pretty sure the seventh hit, the triple that knotted the record, was going to be caught.
Even lesser known than Stennett’s and Robinson’s record is the all-time record for most hits in a single Major League game. In 1932, John Burnett (hardly a household name in the sport) of the Cleveland Indians, collected nine hits in one game, albeit one that lasted 18 innings.
Robinson achieved more fame as a manager and he was a Casey Stengel-like boss in some ways, more adroit as a leader than always given credit for, but also for his witticisms when his charges more resembled the early days of the New York Mets.
At one time things were going so badly for the Dodgers (like the inept Mets of the early 1960s) that Robinson established a fine system where $10 was put into a pot as punishment for stupid mistakes. He promptly made the first dumb mistake by putting one catcher’s name in the lineup delivered to the home-plate umpire and then starting a different one.
During one entire road trip, Robinson never sent a single sign from the dugout to his players after he concluded, “Most of those fellows out there are too dumb to read signs.”