Here’s a baseball oddity …

The season is only three games old, and there are NO undefeated teams, and no 0-3 teams. There are now 30 teams in MLB, and not a single one went 3-0 or 0-3. That has only about a 1.3% chance of happening (once every 75-80 years), and has never happened before in the expansion era (1961-present).

The last year when no team started 3-0 or 0-3 was 1953. (It had about a 10% chance of happening in the 16-team era.)

The last year when no team started 3-0 was actually 1954, but there were two 0-3 teams that year. The Cardinals started 0-3 in especially grand fashion, allowing 43 runs in those three games. They lost game three to the Cubs by the improbable score of 23-13 in one of those crazy classics with the wind blowing out at Wrigley Field. The Cubs had 20 hits and 12 walks in that game, and had scored 22 of their 23 runs in the first five innings! The Cubs starting catcher that day was the legendary Joe Garagiola, who finished the game with a seasonal batting average of 1.000! (To make a long story short, that was the final season of his career and he rarely played. This was his first game of the season and he went 3-for-3.)

Joe was not as bad a ballplayer as he often claimed for story-telling purposes. At one time he was considered such a good prospect that the Cardinals broke all kinds of rules to sign him at age 15. By the time he was 16, he was playing pro ball in the Cardinals farm organization, although just a junior in high school. He did well enough that they promoted him to AA the following year, where he batted a solid .293 for the Columbus Red Birds at age 17.

In the 1946 World Series, although he was a 20-year-old major league rookie, he contributed significantly to the Cardinals’ victory, batting .316 and stroking four hits in game four.