Baseball Trivia

Every  player on a baseball team ends the game with the same batting average as he had at the start of the game (which goes nine innings).

It has happened once in baseball history.  Explain the "how" and the "when."

Comments

[Lance McMillian]

How: a team is on the wrong side of a no hitter on opening day.

When: don't know

[Anon]

Didnt Bob Feller pitch the only no hitter on opening day in MLB history?

[Steven Lubet]

Assuming that you were looking for Feller's no hitter, I don't think it is correct to say that a player's batting average is .000 before the first game of the season. Batting average is computed by dividing the number of base hits by the number of official times at bat. Division by zero has no meaning and cannot be expressed as a real number (0/0 has an indeterminate number of solutions.) Thus, a player has no batting average before the season's first pitch, which is different from an average of .000.

[Tim Zinnecker]

Bob Feller's opening-day no-hitter on April 16, 1940, is indeed the answer. Not bad for a 21-year-old. Feller would add two additional no-no's to his list of accomplishments, which ranks him with Cy Young and Larry Corcoran, and behind only Sandy Koufax (4) and Nolan Ryan (7) for career no-hitters.

[Jeff Lipshaw]

To pile on Steve's point, I'm not sure what the number theory principle would be, but at the start of the game, if you added one hit, the batter's average would then be 1.000. Assuming each batter went 0 for 3, now if you add one hit, the batter's average would be .250. So in a relativist way, the batting averages at the two moments don't describe the same states, even if the numbers are the same. (For some reason, I'm thinking of a Turing machine and the tape sliding one unit forward or backward.)

[Jeff Lipshaw]

I guess on my theory a .333 average that is 3 for 9 isn't the same as a .333 that is 9 for 27, so I am going to go back to the drawing board on that one.

[Matthew Reid Krell]

Another possible solution: In Game 2 of the season, every player hits the same result (1 for 3, 2 for 2, etc.) as they did on Opening Day.

I don't know if that's ever happened.

[Matthew Reid Krell]

And that solution generalizes to n games where as of n-1 games every player has a batting average that is replicable in a single nine-inning game.