About twenty years ago, I had a friend in Seattle who liked to make small bets – a few bucks or a couple of beers – on all sorts of sports. Brian usually started by saying “Let’s make this interesting.” I suppose it’s more interesting because if you might possibly win money, you’ll cheer for your team. Or you’ll cheer for the over/under or or point spread or whatever. I later moved away from Seattle and a mutual friend told me that Brian died.
One night Brian and I were in a bar and a World Series game had just started on TV. Brian said, “Let’s make this interesting. I’ll bet you ten bucks that the winning team scores more runs in a single inning than the losing team scores in the whole game. It doesn’t matter which team wins. I get the big inning from the winner. You get ALL NINE innings from the loser. Nine innings for you, one for me.” Interesting idea. After thinking about it, probably way too much, I didn’t take his bet. For one thing, I would automatically lose a shutout. If the losing team gets zero runs, it wouldn’t matter what the winner’s big inning was; I would lose. On the other hand if the final score was something like 8-7, I would probably win the bet unless the winning team scored all eight runs in a single inning. Plus, if the home team is winning after 8.5 innings, they don’t bat in the bottom of the ninth. That might give me a slight advantage. I thought about it and said no.
The main reason I didn’t take his bet was that I suspected Brian’s “Big Inning Theory” was probably true. Maybe Brian had analyzed the scores of World Series games. More likely, maybe he had read an article in Sports Illustrated or in some book. I didn’t trust the way he offered the bet. He didn’t give me a choice; he wanted the winning team’s “big inning” all for himself.
I remembered this twenty-year-old discussion on Friday while I was watching the World Series. I then went to Wikipedia and looked at the last ten World Series (2011-2020, not including 2021). In 35 of 61 games over ten years, the winning team scored more runs in a single inning than the losers scored in the whole game (including games that went into extra innings). The big inning theory works about 57% of the time. I don’t have the time or inclination to go back 120+ years (which would include the steroid era, the higher pitcher-mound era, the designated-hitter era, the WWII era, the dead-ball era, etc., etc.).
I googled it and found someone who analyzed World Series games from the 1960s and 1970s. They came up with the same number: 57% of the time the Big Inning Theory works. And it turns out that Earl Weaver, manager of the Baltimore Orioles from the late-1960s to the 1980s, liked the “Big Inning Theory.” It’s sometimes called “The Big Bang Theory,” but if you google that, you’ll get a zillion hits for the TV show and the beginning of the universe.
Earl Weaver didn’t believe in small ball (sacrifice bunts, stealing bases, scoring one or two runs at a time). He liked a big inning with several home runs and lots of scoring. People have been talking about this for fifty years.
Incidentally, in the last 10 years, the only World Series that ended after four games was when the SF Giants swept the Detroit Tigers 8-3, 2-0, 2-0, and 4-3. The Giants only won the “big inning” bet in the two shutouts. They lost the bet in the other two games.