The Single-Season Runs-Allowed Record for Pitchers

It’s a funny thing about trivia. The pejorative “trivial” can overwhelm us and blind us of its educational possibilities. That an inquiry is “trivial” (which is really to say that it is narrow) should not be used as an excuse for not reflecting upon and building upon the answer it provides.

It is from this perspective that I present to you the pitchers who have allowed the most runs allowed in a season, and it is why the exercise fans out beyond¹ a simple answer or a simple name.

The most runs allowed in a season since 1900 is the 226 Lewis Wiltse gave up in 1902. I had not heard of Lewis, but his brother Hooks was a fine pitcher who gave ballast to the Mathewson Giants. As I vaguely recall that there has been some effort to clear Hooks of that moniker, I assumed I was really getting Hooks data after completing my search, and that he showed up as his given name, Lewis, as a result of the rethinking. But Hooks was in fact properly a George; this was his brother.

Anyway, probably about time we move on and leave “The Importance of Being Earnest” sensibility that the Wiltses spawn behind us….

In the 19th century, Wiltse’s 226 runs allowed were topped no fewer than 298 times. These were distributed with a count of 143 in the 1870s, 93 in the 1880s, and 62 times in the 1890s.

The proper all-time record is Jim Britt’s 519 runs allowed in 1873, which bettered (or damaged?) the 473 he had allowed the previous year. Those are the two highest marks of the 1870s.

For its time and place, certainly in the 19th-century, the most impressive season may be John Coleman’s 510 runs allowed with Philadelphia in 1883. This gives being pounded and perhaps shell-shocked an entirely new meaning. Who, after all, could have the recall to remember 772 hits allowed individually? (Would love to see a montage of all of them on video tape!) My point about Coleman’s staggering totals is made when you realize that no one else in the 1880s gave up more than 369 runs in a season (Phenomenal Smith, 1887).

A Kid Casey has the 1890s record, with 358 runs allowed in 1891.

It appears there was a swift decline in runs-allowed totals throughout the decade and that it continued in the early years of the 1900s. Just three years before Wiltse, in 1899, Bill Carrick allowed 250 runs for the Giants. The next year, no one allowed more than 224, and that was Carrick again, with only his teammate Pink Hawley also over 200 runs allowed, with 204.

I certainly see the pattern of a small number of teams dominating the pitcher runs-allowed standings in any given year. I suppose this shows that there were no one-man rotations, or that could not happen. And I guess what I really mean is that a team might have two guys 1-2, or specifically that is teammates who tend to dominate.²

The 1897 Browns are a case in point. Red Donahue (10-35, 72 ERA+) allowed 306 runs, while Bill Hart allowed 292. Donahue was 2nd in the NL in innings, but Hart only 17th. So the dreadful nature of the Chris Von Der Ahe team was apparently essential to the runs allowed, not mostly the team’s indifference to workload, as you might imagine. The 20-134 1899 Cleveland Spiders should not overshadow these 29-102 Browns.

While Bill Carrick’s overall record made him really deserve the single-season post-1900 mark, Wiltse isn’t quite a product of an arbitrary cut-off line. A pitcher coming from 1900 or 1901 allowing the most runs would have made more sense than one coming from 1902. Here is the count of pitchers allowing 160 or more runs by year, with the exhortation to keep in mind that the American League came along in 1901, expanding the size of the major leagues.

1900: 8

1901: 18

1902: 5

1903: 8

1904: 6

1905: 4

1906-1910: 0

1911: 1

1912: 1

1913-1920: 0

With the seismic shift in baseball that came with the lively ball, 160+ run seasons resumed in 1921. There were three in all that year, and nine from 1921-1925.

The highest run total allowed in that group of seasons (by a margin of 15) was the 182 Dickey Kerr gave up in 1921.

Not by dint of that, of course, but Kerr is a figure in baseball history. He is known for being far from the White Sox best pitcher, but an honest Sock who won two games for them in the 1919 World Series, one of which was a 3-0 shutout in game 3. Hence, he remained on the 1921 White Sox, which, as you probably know, is the first White Sox team after the ban of Jackson, etc., since the scandal didn’t break until the end of 1920.

Kerr’s 89 ERA+ in 1921 wasn’t that bad, but since he gave up all of those runs, your thought is that the year signifies a team uniquely ripped apart. But, curiously to me at first, Kerr had a 19-17 record that season.

I subsequently saw that, interestingly, from 1921-1928, the White Sox are better characterized as mediocre than thought of as the equivalent of one of these 1990s Pirates kinds of teams that had all their players leave for more money. The ‘21 Sox were 62-92, but from ‘21-’28, the team’s average record was actually 72-82. The 92 losses of this Sox team are the most in the period.

1929-1934 was actually rock bottom for the Sox on the field. During that time, the team lost an average of 94 games, only once doing better than 7th place.

One bright light who allowed the White Sox to absorb the banning of their players with slightly less pain than they otherwise would have was Red Faber. Faber spent his whole 20-year career with the White Sox, winning 254 games, and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1964. He led AL pitchers in bWAR in 1922, as he did in 1921. He was so good in 1921, he threw 22 more innings than Kerr, but allowed 75 fewer runs.

The pattern from 1920-1940 as a whole is of some peak times of high runs-allowed seasons, and some peak years within those times, and other times of quiescence.

1926-1929 represented a cooling, with just two 160+ runs-allowed seasons.

But 1930, at least in the National League, was very much the counterpart of Year of the Pitcher 1968, and eight pitchers between the two leagues allowed 160 or more runs.

Some of the euphoria carried over to 1931 and 1932, with five more 160+ runs seasons in those years. Included in this was the high of the whole 1930-1932 period, the 187 runs allowed by the Browns’ Sam Gray in 1931.

Then the specimen of 160-runs allowed pitchers was not seen from 1933-1935.

There is reason to remember the 1936 American League other than just Joe DiMaggio’s rookie year, the juggernaut Yankee team, and the beginning of a dynasty;³ with 5.67 runs-a-game scored across the league, that also remains the highest scoring year in American League history (by a margin of some 40 runs per-team per-162-games). In alignment, six pitchers (joined by no National Leaguers) gave up 160+ runs.

The idea of a carryover or an emptying gas tank is then demonstrated by three 160+ run seasons across the two leagues in 1937, two such seasons in 1938, and one each in 1939 and 1940.

But continuing another pattern that is hard to credit as anything other than oddity, for most runs in a season, 1936 was not the breeding ground, but 1938, with Bobo Newsom giving up a remarkable 205. We have to almost go back to Wiltse to find such a high total, but Togie Pittinger of the Braves spoiled that, as he gave up the same 205 in 1903, the year after Wiltse’s conditional record.

There are no two ways about it. In this part of his career, Newsom gave up an ungodly number of runs. Not only did he give up 205 runs in 1938, but giving up 160 runs in 1936 and 163 in 1937, he is the only pitcher in the 160+-run club in each of 1936, 1937, and 1938.

Perhaps giving the best evidence yet, however, that giving up a lot of runs is very different than being a bad pitcher, or even having a high E.R.A., Newsom’s record over these three seasons was 53-45, and his ERA+ 102.

From this, again, we surmise that he must have pitched a lot of innings. Although his innings total in 1938 was 329.2, easily topping the majors that season, it hardly seems historic. And in 1936 and 1937, Newsom would have needed multiple complete games to reach 300 innings (although it is true he was 3rd in the AL in innings each year).

So we see that what is pretentiously known as the “run environment” was instrumental in fueling his high run totals. I suppose, for some reason, among pitchers who performed at less than the top level, he was given the chance to pitch the most.

The caliber of the only other guy to give up 160+ runs two times from 1936-1938 also labels high runs allowed less than a disgrace. Wes Ferrell’s career bWAR reads 60.1.

Newsom is also worth knowing for the length of his career. He debuted in 1929 and retired in 1953, and retired as a real pitcher, not in some Minnie Minoso or 1904-Dan Brouthers-like stunt.

The case can be made that this tendency of giving up a lot of runs follows pitchers around, and is not team based, or park-based, as you might imagine. To wit, Bill Carrick, coming off back-to-back NL-leading seasons of runs allowed in 1899 and 1900, moved to Washington in 1901, and then gave up by far the most runs in the American League over the next two years combined.⁴ In Newsom’s case, he was with the Nationals⁵ in 1936, the Nationals and Red Sox in 1937, and the Browns in 1938.

After George Caster gave up 160 runs for the 1940 Athletics, there wasn’t another 160+ runs-allowed pitcher until Wilbur Wood yielded 166 in 1973. Phil Niekro followed him with 160+ runs-allowed seasons in 1977 and 1979 (with a combined bWAR of 16.3), but that this possibility also existed for non-knuckleballers in this era is proven by Joe Coleman’s 160 runs allowed in 1974.

After Phil Niekro in 1979, the only pitcher to have reached 160 runs allowed is Pedro Astacio, 1998, who was with the Rockies, and threw just 209.1 innings. Astacio gave up 160 runs exactly, as did Caster and Coleman. The frequency of this number perhaps indicates that totals of this magnitude are freakish, and push the boundaries of what is natural.

That said, to marvel at Astacio’s 160 runs allowed, or think it worthy of a statistical retrospective, would be making too much of it, in my opinion. From 1996-2000, there were four other seasons of 150+ runs allowed. Only one belonged to a Rockie (Darryl Kile, 1999), so runs-allowed totals in this stratosphere were not just a Coors Field phenomenon.

I’m not sure if the few prominent knuckleballers post Wood and Niekro have comparable workloads once adjustment for the general downturn in innings is made, but Tim Wakefield (1996) is one of those 150+ run pitchers.

A more extreme year was actually produced by Charlie Hough in 1987 (mostly a knuckleballer, for you young ‘uns and historically lazy ‘uns). Giving up 159 runs, he just missed 160, and leads everyone in the 1980-1995 era by 14 runs.

Nowadays, certainly, the totals pale next to those even of the late ‘90s. 160 runs isn’t going to happen again, and in reviewing the numbers, the totals have dropped steadily over this century along with innings. But Jordan Lyles, who gave up 130 runs in 2023 with the Royals, and Lance Lynn, who gave up 127 the same season with the White Sox and Dodgers, did turn the clock back a bit. While I haven’t found an MLB full-season leader with less than the 114 total Patrick Corbin sported a couple of times (2021, 2024), Lyles was the first pitcher to give up 130 runs since Carlos Silva gave up that many in 2006. Even Lynn’s total, matched by Luke Hochevar in 2012, hadn’t been topped since James Shields allowed 128 runs in 2010.

1. ChatGPT gets the credit for “beyond” here. Was struggling with how to complete the “fans out” phrase.

2. However, it is true that behind Wiltse in 1902, the pitchers placing 2nd, 3rd, and 4th in the AL in runs allowed were all Washington Senators (the one-and-only Bill Carrick; Casey Patten; and Al Orth).

3. In fact, it seems to me that the offensive abundance likely has made what should be a revered team even more revered, in that it gave the hitting statistics a real sheen. The Yankees won the same 102 regular season games in 1937 they won in 1936, and won more than that in 1932 and 1939.

4. Although, in the individual seasons, he was 4th and 2nd in runs allowed.

5. Trying to be faithful to the operative team name of the period, I had to use Nationals for Washington in these years. However, their better-known name “Senators” was apparently the name in 1902, reflecting my use in that case. Weird, huh?

Baseball Reference has them as the Nationals when they won the World Series in 1924.