You may have heard in the past about players who had great one-game careers, great seasons, great moments even, but has anyone in professional baseball ever had a greater INNING than Gene Rye? The diminutive outfielder of the 1930 Waco club in the Texas League accomplished something no other player has, before or since, by blasting out three home runs in one inning! Rye later went on to play for the Boston Red Sox, and went homerless in his 17-game big league career
Perhaps no one will beat the one-game pitching record of Ron Necciai, who in his regular turn for Bristol of the Appalachian League on May 13, 1952 actually threw a no-hitter where he struck out 27 batters, an all-time record! Just to prove that was no fluke, Necciai turned around and fanned 24 batters in his next start! Necciai was promoted to the Pittsburgh Pirates later that season, but only managed to compile a 1-6 record and 7.04 ERA.
Sammy Sosa has topped the 60-homer mark three times, and Mark McGwire has done it twice in the big leagues, but the only player to turn the trick twice in the minors is Joe Hauser, a first baseman for the Philadelphia Athletics of the 1920's who ended his career in the bushes. In 1930 he smacked 63 home runs for the International League's Baltimore Orioles, then came back in 1933 to blast 69 for the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association.
McGwire beat that total by one four-bagger in 1998, but at the time he still had to settle for second place on the all-time list in Organized Baseball (until Barry Bonds' 73 of course). Local fans must have thought they were seeing UFO's in 1954 when Joe Bauman, playing for Roswell (N.M.) in the Class C Longhorn League, pumped out 72 round-trippers, a mark which held up until Bonds' onslaught in 2001. You would think a feat like that would have produced a swift ticket to the majors, but in reality, Bauman never played an inning of big league ball!
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