High school baseball team wins 82-0 after coach schedules wrong opponent

Every baseball coach dreams of their team dominating to earn a victory. But last week, Old Rochester Regional High School in Plymouth County, Mass., put up a scoreline that was so thoroughly one-sided it left even their own coach upset by the result.

On April 15, the Old Rochester Bulldogs varsity baseball team defeated Notre Dame Cristo Rey in nearby Lawrence, Mass., by a score of 82-0, according to Dan Ventura of the Boston Herald. Old Rochester plated 12 in the first inning, a 20-spot in the second, and didn't stop from there en route to the incredibly lopsided victory - despite their coach, Steve Carvalho, begging his team to stop scoring runs against what turned out to be the wrong school.

"I'm sick to my stomach over this," Carvalho said. "We really tried everything possible. We told the kids don't take extra bases, no sprinting - we even had kids bunting and they couldn't make the routine plays. We had kids hitting balls 300 feet and jogging to first.

"We even asked that they stop the game after four innings and they said no. Believe me, we exhausted all options in our power."

Carvalho said he scheduled the game without realizing that there are actually two schools named Notre Dame Cristo Rey. His team played the wrong one - not a school of equal size, but rather an all-male, 103-student school that normally competes one level below Old Rochester in the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association, and therefore stood no chance against the powerful Bulldogs.

"We had 18 games and we were searching for a 19th game," Carvalho explained. "We looked at the MIAA website and saw Cristo Rey was looking for a game. I didn't realize at the time that there were two Cristo Reys."

There seems to be no ill will from Notre Dame's side despite the lopsided score, though, as Notre Dame is still planning to visit Old Rochester for a rematch on May 19. Carvalho says he'll field a junior squad that day to try and avoid another lopsided win.

While Old Rochester's win is the most lopsided in Massachusetts history, it's not even close to the national record. According to Ventura, the largest victory in United States high school baseball history occurred in 1928, when a school in Iowa won 109-0.