Every final score posted during the 1871 Major League Baseball season, tabulated by winning-team runs and losing-team runs.
Baseball games end with a final score, like 8–6. The number across the top is how many runs the winning team scored; the number down the side is how many runs the losing team scored. Where a column and row meet, that square shows how many 1871 games ended with that score — click it to see them.
The 1871 season produced 127 games between 9 clubs, running from May 4, 1871 to October 30, 1871. Those games ended in 98 different final scores, 76 of which occurred exactly once all season. The most common result was 9–7, posted 4 times — 3.1% of the season's games. The season also produced two tie games, which sit on the board's diagonal.
Teams combined for 20.94 runs per game in 1871, 11.49 runs above the all-time average of 9.45. That is the highest scoring rate among the 30 seasons before 1901. Shutouts accounted for 4 games (3.1% of the total), and 12 of the 125 decided games were settled by a single run (9.6%).
The highest-scoring game of the season came on June 28, 1871, when the Philadelphia Quakers beat the Troy Trojans 49–33 — 82 combined runs. The widest margin was 21 runs: the Boston Red Stockings over the Fort Wayne Kekiongas 21–0 on June 21, 1871.
A total of 98 final scores appeared for the first time during 1871: 2–0, 3–3, 4–0, 4–1, 4–4, 5–2, 5–3, 5–4, 6–3, 6–4, 6–5, 7–1, and 86 others. Almost every score was new in these years, because there was so little history for a result to be new against. The board filled itself faster in the 1870s than it could ever be filled again.
This was the first season of the National Association, the first professional baseball league. Fielding gloves were not yet in general use and schedules were short and uneven, which is why the scores on this board look almost nothing like modern baseball.