Thursday, December 17, 2020

Newsletter Excerpt, December 17, 2020 -- "Fun With Numbers: The Shortest Year"

This is a preview of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for nearly 25 years.


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"The minor-league doubleheader rule, shortening games played in doubleheaders to seven innings apiece, was the bigger factor. Some scheduled seven-inning games needed extra innings -- creating “runner on second to start the eighth” weirdness -- so teasing them all out is a bit of a challenge. There were 101 wins, though, in games in which the winning team threw exactly seven innings, a decent approximation of the total number of seven-inning games scheduled. There were 898 games played, so seven-inning games accounted for about one in every nine last year -- enough to make this the shortest season in baseball history by any measure."