August 3, 1989: The Cincinnati Reds equal the second-highest scoring first inning in modern Major League history, pushing across 14 runs against the Houston Astros at Riverfront Stadium. The Reds sent a record 20 men to the plate and collected 16 hits. Seven different Reds logged two hits apiece during the outburst, another MLB record. The bottom of the first lasted 38 minutes, with the Reds going on to win the game 18-2.
The modern MLB record is 15 runs by the Brooklyn Dodgers against Cincinnati in 1952. The 1989 Reds matched the 1950 Cleveland Indians, who put up 14 versus the Philadelphia A’s. The Boston Red Sox joined them with a 14-run first inning in a 25-8 romp over the Florida Marlins in 2003. The Red Sox scored a major league record 10 runs before the first out was recorded. Johnny Damon had a single, double and triple in that inning alone.
That game was an aberration for the Reds, who had a gigantic cloud over their heads. It was exactly three weeks later that Cincinnati manager Pete Rose was forced out due to gambling allegations. The firestorm had been swirling for six months, when it became widely known that Rose was betting on baseball, including games involving his own team. He had spent the season battling the allegations—and the calls for commissioner Bart Giamatti to suspend him. But Rose, despite being an unfathomable distraction, stubbornly continued to skipper the Reds.
The hammer came down on August 24, when Rose was banned from baseball. While denying that he bet on baseball, he accepted a permanent place on the sport’s ineligible list. In 1991, the Baseball Hall of Fame invoked a rule preventing anyone on the ineligible list from being inducted. Rose finally admitted to betting on his own team in his 2004 autobiography. Then in 2007, he acknowledged that he bet on the Reds every single game he managed them.
Nevertheless, Rose relentlessly lobbied for reinstatement to baseball. He applied again in 2015 when Rob Manfred became commissioner but was denied. In 2020, Rose submitted a petition to Manfred that went unanswered, and he wrote a personal letter to Manfred in 2022 pleading for eligibility to the Hall of Fame to be restored. But Manfred said that ballot rules were the Hall’s business. Then, after Rose died in 2024, Manfred issued a landmark 2025 policy change declaring that MLB’s permanent ineligibility list terminates upon an individual’s death. Rose is posthumously eligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)