The idea behind this whole site, how the boards work, and a full rundown of every tool on it.
A scorigami is a final score that has never happened before in a sport's recorded history. The term is a portmanteau of “score” and “origami,” coined by sportswriter Jon Bois in 2014 for SB Nation, originally to chart NFL final scores.
This site applies that same idea to Major League Baseball. Every one of the 235,864 games in this dataset ended with some combination of winning-team runs and losing-team runs — 8–6, 3–2, 12–4, and so on. A score's scorigami moment is the very first time that exact combination ever happened, going all the way back to 1871. After that, it's just an ordinary final score that happens to repeat — until a brand-new combination shows up somewhere else on the board.
Every board on this site — the all-time hub and each of the 156 year pages — is the same idea at a different scale. Across the top is the winning team's runs. Down the side is the losing team's runs. Where a column and a row meet, that square represents one possible final score.
The number inside a square is how many times that score has actually happened, within whatever you're currently viewing — the full 1871–2026 span, a single season, a chosen date range, or one team's history. Click any square to see exactly which years, or which specific games, produced it.
You'll also notice a hatched, unclickable wedge cut out of the bottom-right of every board. That's not missing data — it's mathematically impossible. A losing team can't outscore the team that won, so a “final score” like 3–8 simply can't exist, and the board doesn't pretend otherwise.
The strangest thing about scorigami in baseball is that almost all of it happened immediately.
270 distinct final scores appeared for the first time during the 1870s — 98 of them in the 1871 season alone. That isn't because early baseball was more varied. It's because in 1871 there was no history for a score to be new against, so every result was a scorigami by default. The board filled itself faster than it could ever be filled again.
By 1900 the ordinary range was exhausted. Every sensible combination of runs — every 5–3, every 7–2, every 11–8 — had already happened. What remains unclaimed are only the absurd ones: scores that require a game to go badly wrong in a specific, unrepeated way. Since 1980, new scores have appeared only a handful of times — and only once since the year 2000. The Cool Facts page keeps the running count, which updates itself the morning any new score lands.
That is what makes a modern baseball scorigami worth noticing. It isn't a quirk of the schedule. It's a game landing somewhere no game has landed in 150 years of trying.
Look at any board for a moment and its shape starts to say something.
Almost everything clusters in the bottom-left corner, in the low-run, close-game squares. 3–2 alone accounts for more than 13,000 games. The ten most common scores between them cover around 38% of every game ever played, and nearly a third of all games have been decided by exactly one run. Baseball, in aggregate, is a game of narrow margins.
The further out from that corner you go, the thinner the board gets, until it trails off into squares holding a single game from a single afternoon in the 1870s. Dozens of scores have happened exactly once and never again.
The hatched wedge along the bottom-right is different: it isn't empty, it's impossible. A losing team can't outscore the winner, so those squares can never hold anything.
Switching between the era presets is the quickest way to see this move. The dead-ball years pull everything tight toward the corner. The high-offense stretches push it outward. The board isn't just a record of scores — it's a picture of how the sport itself has changed.
Completed seasons come from Retrosheet's publicly published game logs, which are the standard reference for historical Major League results — a volunteer effort that has reconstructed box scores back to the beginning of the National Association in 1871. The season currently in progress comes from the MySportsFeeds API and is refreshed every morning, so a game played last night appears on the board today.
A few things worth knowing about how the data is counted here. Ties are excluded from the boards: a tie has no winner and no loser, so it has nowhere to sit on a grid built from winning and losing runs. Games from the National Association era (1871–1875) are included, which is why the earliest scores look so unlike modern baseball. And a score's first appearance is the first time that exact combination shows up anywhere in the dataset, not the first time in the modern era.
The early years are the least certain part of any baseball dataset. Nineteenth-century box scores were reconstructed from newspaper accounts, and Retrosheet revises them as better sources surface. If you spot something that looks wrong, email baseballscorigami@gmail.com — include the season, the date, and the two teams, and it can be checked against the source. Bug reports and suggestions are welcome at the same address.
Everything below lives on the all-time board, and most of it carries over to each year's page too:
Every completed season on this site comes from Retrosheet's public game logs; the season currently in progress comes from the MySportsFeeds API and is updated every morning. Together that's 235,864 games across 156 Major League seasons, from 1871 through 2026. This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Major League Baseball.
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