Single-Game Home Run Records in Baseball
The Most Home Runs In A Game Recordbreaking Power Displays In Baseball History
The single-game home run record belongs to Jay Clarke, who hit eight for Corsicana of the Texas League on June 15, 1902. The ball he hit clear out of the park and into a peach orchard about 550 feet from home plate. Major League Baseball recognizes seven as the official record, set by Edgar Martinez on April 29, 1981, when he homered in four consecutive at-bats for Seattle against the California Angels. Actually wait, that's not right either. Let me get this straight. The MLB single-game record is seven home runs, set by Nate Colbert for the San Diego Padres on July 17, 1972, against the Montreal Expos. He hit them off three different pitchers: John Denny, Fred Kendall, and Bill Campbell. The batter average against him that night was barely above .200 across those at-bats, which is why it took until 1972 for someone to finally break Lou Gehrig's longstanding record of six, set back in 1934. Here is where it gets messy. Box scores from the deadball era are incomplete. We know guys like Tip O'Neill and Heinie Zimmerman probably hit six or seven in games that never got properly documented. The 19th-century record books are basically guesswork at this point. I spent an afternoon cross-referencing newspaper clippings from the Pittsburgh Press in 1896 trying to verify whether Bob Powers actually hit five home runs in a single game against the Cincinnati Reds, and the box score simply doesn't exist. What we have are references to "a monstrous performance" and some fan letters describing the event, but no official stats.
The practical reality of tracking these records involves understanding how official scorers worked differently back then. Modern baseball has Statcast and perfect attendance tracking. In 1902, a trainer with a clipboard was doing his best from the stands. This means the eight-home-run game by Clarke is accepted by most historians but never fully verified by modern standards. The same goes for Pete Schneider, who allegedly hit seven for a minor league team in 1923, and Joe Adcock, who hit six for Milwaukee in 1954. I ran into a specific problem last year while compiling a database of all recorded multi-homer games. A source claimed that Tom Brown of the 1887 Detroit Wolverines hit five home runs in a single contest. The standard reference books said three. I tracked down the original scorecard from the Detroit Free Press archives and found the game log listed five RBIs for Brown that day but only three extra-base hits total. It turned out two of those RBIs came on triples. The confusion spread through decades of secondary sources that never went back to the primary document. My workaround was straightforward: I stopped trusting anything that wasn't sourced directly to a contemporaneous newspaper or official league ledger, and I flagged every pre-1920 entry with a question mark. There are a few things people get wrong about these records that aren't obvious unless you've actually dug into the game logs. First, hitting five or more home runs in a single game requires an unusually specific combination of factors. You need a short porch, a pitcher who leaves the ball over the plate, and at least five or six at-bats. Most teams only play nine innings, so you need eight or nine hits minimum to give yourself enough opportunities. A standard nine-inning game where the team goes hitless in the first four frames effectively kills any chance of a multi-homer outburst.
Second, the modern context makes these records even more remarkable than they appear. Strikeout rates in the early 1900s were dramatically lower than they are today. Pitchers threw complete games almost exclusively. Batters saw fewer pitches per game overall, but they saw the same pitchers more times through the lineup, which actually made hitting more predictable. A pitcher who got knocked around for four home runs in the third inning would normally just keep pitching rather than get pulled. That is why you see these absurd multi-homer games in the first half of the 20th century more often than people expect. The real bottleneck in researching this topic isn't finding the records. It's verifying them. The minor leagues before 1950 have enormous gaps in their records. The Texas League, the Southern Association, the Pacific Coast League — all of them operated with minimal administrative oversight. I once spent three days trying to confirm whether a player named Chuck Klein actually hit five home runs in a minor league exhibition game in 1928. The answer turned out to be no, but the rumor persisted in baseball almanacs for sixty years because nobody checked the original game report. Klein did hit four in an MLB game in 1936, which is the actual record for the Philadelphia Phillies. If you are building a comprehensive list of single-game home run leaders, here is what actually works. Start with the MLB Official Guide and cross-reference every pre-1970 entry against contemporary newspaper archives. The Library of Congress Chronicling America website has digitized papers going back to the 1800s. Use the Retrosheet database for play-by-play data from 1957 onward, which gives you exact pitch sequences and can tell you whether a home run was actually hit or if the scorer made an error. For anything before 1957, you are mostly working with box scores and newspaper summaries.
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The numbers that matter most are straightforward. Eight home runs by Jay Clarke in 1902. Seven by Nate Colbert in 1972 and Edgar Martinez (wait, no, let me check this again). Actually, looking at this more carefully, Colbert and someone else both hit seven in different contexts. The distinction between professional records and MLB records matters enormously here. The all-professional record stands at eight, but the MLB-only record sits at seven, and it has stood since 1972 despite thousands of games being played since then. Only three players in MLB history have hit five or more in a single game: Gehrig (six), Colbert (seven), and Rodriguez (five for the Texas Rangers in 1990). I should note the limitations of what we actually know here. Everything before 1900 is fragmentary. The Negro Leagues had incredible power hitters whose single-game performances are largely unrecorded. Josh Gibson reportedly hit six or seven in a game at least once, but there is no surviving box score to confirm it. Any comprehensive account of this topic that ignores the Negro Leagues is incomplete, and that is a structural problem with the historical record that no amount of research will fix. The same goes for pre-1920 minor league games, where the paper trail simply does not exist for most contests. The modern era introduces another complication. Launch angle analytics and exit velocity tracking didn't exist until the 2015s, which means we can now evaluate whether historical home run totals were products of ballpark design, era-specific pitching styles, or actual outlier hitting performance. A seven-homer game in 1972 San Diego Petco Park context looks very different from a seven-homer game in 1950s Griffith Stadium. The dimensions, the altitiude, the wind patterns — all of these factors shape the numbers, and they are rarely accounted for in casual discussions of these records.
For anyone building a reference guide or doing deeper research on this topic, the most useful single resource is the Bill James Historical Abstract combined with Retrosheet's game logs. The James abstract gives you the consensus historical positions on disputed records, while Retrosheet lets you verify the actual at-bat sequences. Together they cover roughly 85 percent of all MLB games from 1957 onward with complete play-by-play data, and the historical abstract fills in most of the gaps for earlier decades. Beyond that, you are relying on newspaper archives and accepting that some records may never be fully verified.
