Atlanta 12, Milwaukee 8

Back in the early 80s, when I was a college freshman, I was wandering through the Intimate Bookshop in downtown Chapel Hill and came across something called The Baseball Abstract by someone called Bill James. I picked it up and was immediately entranced, so I took some of my beer money and bought it. I don’t remember a lot of that particular year’s version (I think it was the ’82 edition), but the one article that has stuck with me all these years was a study Bill did on big innings. It seems he found that in a statistically significant number of games the winning team had one inning where they scored more runs than the losing team would score the entire game. Last night was just the latest (if extreme) example of that long-ago discovery by The Father of Sabremetrics.

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