Once game three of the American League Division Series hit the 16th inning, it had made history. Not for what the teams did, but for what they didn’t. NO ONE scored.
Zeros filled the scoreboard inning after inning as the Houston Astros and Seattle Mariners repeatedly returned to their dugouts without getting a player around the bases. The television game announcers, who had earlier declared we were “scoreless in Seattle”, later announced it was the first post season game to go 16 scoreless innings. The scoreless stretch did not come to an end until Jeremy Peña knocked a ball out of the park in the top of the 18th inning, giving the Astros the one run they needed to sweep the ALDS and advance to the American League Championship Series.
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While the long stretch with no runs made the post-season game historic, 16 innings is less than 2/3 the length of the longest Major League Baseball games in history.
According to MLB.com, the longest game (by innings) took place in 1920 between the Brooklyn Robins and the Boston Braves and lasted 26 hours. It was called due to darkness and ended in a tie.
MLB records show the longest game by time went 25 innings and took longer than eight hours to complete. It happened in 1984 between the Chicago White Sox and the Milwaukee Brewers. MLB had a rule that new innings could not begin at 1 a.m., so when the score was still tied at that wee hour of the night, the game called until the next day.
There was one other 25 inning game that happened 10 years earlier. In 1974, the St. Louis Cardinals and New York Mets went deep into the night and finished the game at 3:13 a.m., according to MLB. It was the longest continuous, completed Major League game.
The Houston Astros are named toward the top of the longest games in MLB history list. In 1968, the Astros and New York Mets went scoreless for 24 innings (not in the post-season). The game in the Astrodome went six hours and six minutes, according to the list organized by MLB.com.
The 1989 Houston Astros also battled for 24 innings. That seven-hour, 14-minute game ended with a H-town victory against the Dodgers.
You can read more about both of those historic Houston matchups here.