Rockies, Dodgers set records for most players used in one game
September baseball can produce wonderful moments that fans remember forever. Or it can produce the wackiness we saw Tuesday night between the Colorado Rockies and Los Angeles Dodgers.
The NL West-leading Dodgers hosted the last-place Rockies in a game that went 16 innings, lasted 5 hours and 23 minutes and featured a number of weird quirks.
[Check out Big League Stew on Tumblr for even more baseball awesomeness.]
The two teams combined to use 58 total players and 24 pitchers, both major-league records. Colorado trotted out 13 pitchers, a major-league record for most pitchers used by a one team in a game, and 30 players in total, tying the record. Managers Don Mattingly and Walt Weiss sure came close to using the full complement of players available to them thanks to September roster expansion.
“In this time of year, you don’t plan on running out of guys,” Mattingly said. “We pretty much ran out of guys.”
Nolan Arenado, certainly not a September call-up, hit his 39th home run of the season in the top of the 16th to lift the Rockies to a 5-4 win. He hit it off Dodgers right-hander Mat Latos, who was making his first career relief appearance after being removed from Los Angeles’ starting rotation almost two weeks ago.
In the bottom of the 16th, Colorado’s Jason Gurka – a rookie pitcher – was playing right field.
It was just one of those nights.
[On this week’s StewPod: Jose Altuve joins us to talk about the surprising Astros.]
The result didn’t have any effect on the playoff picture. The Dodgers maintained their 7 1/2-game lead in the NL West over San Francisco as the Giants lost to Cincinnati 9-8 in extras.
September baseball. Can you feel it? All the guys, and we mean all of them, who took the field Tuesday night at Dodger Stadium sure can.
More MLB coverage from Yahoo Sports:
– – – – – – –
Israel Fehr is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter. Follow @israelfehr
