“…more runs in one inning than the other team scores the whole game.”
Is this true and does anyone know the source? I have heard it referenced before but never attributed to any one person or source. You can probably (maybe?) figure it out on Baseball Reference, but I’m no good at trying to navigate that site in anything but the most superficial way.
I’m pretty sure I read this for the first time in one of Bill James’s Baseball Abstracts in the early eighties–1983 maybe or 1984?
With changes in numbers of runs scored and how they are scored, I suppose it’s possible that it is no longer the case–but I would guess things haven’t changed that much.
Well, for starters, it’s going to be true of any 1-0 game, which isn’t all that uncommon. Or any other shutout. And in multi-run games, it’s still common for runs to be clustered: A homer with anyone on base will score multiple, and even a simple single with bases loaded will leave the bases loaded, ready for the same thing to happen again.
Not a particularly astute observation, really.
I suppose the logical response is: “so what?”
It affects strategy and the kind of players one develops, and is the countervailing example to proponents of one-run baseball strategies like bunting. That’s why it is interesting.
Old article is old, but David W. Smith (the founder of Retrosheet) tackled this question in 1991 and found the saying to hold true about 46-47% of the time. In the intro to the article he says the notion was “popularized by sports writer Tom Boswell – with a big assist from Earl Weaver.”
Interesting, thank you. I remember reading that this notion was behind Weaver’s “pitching, defense, and the three-run home run” philosophy, but it’s not mentioned in “Weaver on Strategy.”
This article from 1986 indicates someone was apparently tracking baseball’s “Big Bang Theory” at the time and found the occurrence to be 45.2%.
And at the bottom, links to three more articles.
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Life Skill #201: Washing a baseball cap
So all the stats seem to show that “usually” is not (quite) true, technically.
In my experience usually is any amount greater than 50% so it’s not so much technically not quite true, it’s just wrong. The accurate thing to say is that it’s usually not the case.
Pretty sure I read it in George Will’s “Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball”
It was part of a discussion about Weaver’s “pitching, defense, and the three-run home run” philosophy.
I’m curious about the (sorta) inverse. Are there stats that show that a team that scores X amount of runs in one inning wins Y% of the time?
