Every final score posted during the 1938 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 1938 games ended with that score — click it to see them.
The 1938 season produced 1,227 games between 16 clubs, running from April 18, 1938 to October 9, 1938. Those games ended in 119 different final scores, 27 of which occurred exactly once all season. The most common result was 4–3, posted 72 times — 5.9% of the season's games. The season also produced 16 tie games, which sit on the board's diagonal.
Teams combined for 9.78 runs per game in 1938, 0.99 runs above the 1901-onward average of 8.79. Shutouts accounted for 130 games (10.6% of the total), and 352 of the 1,211 decided games were settled by a single run (29.1%).
The highest-scoring game of the season came on June 12, 1938, when the Detroit Tigers beat the Washington Senators 18–12 — 30 combined runs. The widest margin was 19 runs: the Chicago Cubs over the Philadelphia Phillies 21–2 on May 5, 1938.
No final score appeared for the first time in major league history during 1938. Every score posted this season had already happened at least once in an earlier year.
This season belongs to the live-ball era that followed the 1920 rule changes, when scoring rose sharply and stayed high.