The Blue Jays rang up five runs in the very first inning last night, and never looked back, even when the other guys started breathing down the back of their necks in the ninth inning. The very first inning was the decisive moment in the game.
They put a big crooked number on the scoreboard.
Earl Weaver talked over and over, for fifteen years as a manager and in his two books, about the importance of big innings. You win with pitching, fundamentals, and three-run homers. Pitching obviously prevents the other fellow from posting big innings, and three-run homers always ensure a big inning for yourself.
Weaver also used to say that "If you play for one run, that's all you're going to get." As he liked getting more than one run, he avoided those strategies which risked the possibility of the big inning in order to increase the chance of scoring one run - the sac bunt, the stolen base.
The Blue Jays have now played 52 games. In 41 of those games, 79 percent of the time, the team that had the biggest inning won the game. In 7 games, neither team had a single inning better than the other team's. And in 4 games, the team that had the biggest inning lost the game. I don't know if any of you will find that even remotely surprising.
Weaver's Boswell, who by happy coincidence just happens to be named Boswell, Tom Boswell of the Washington Post, was the one who did much to popularize these Weaverian concepts, in particular the Big Bang Theory. The classical Big Bang occurs in a baseball game whenever the winning team scores more runs in a single inning than the losing team does in the entire game. This happens rather often.
Last night wasn't one of those occasions - the Jays 5 run first inning wasn't enough by itself to outscore the Mariners. But in their 52 games this year, the Big Bang Theory held true 28 times. In 28 games, the winning team scored more runs in one inning than the losers did in nine.
The Big Bang Theory is true! Isn't science wonderful?
Now it's 4:00 AM, and I've spent three hours pouring all this data into a spreadsheet, and I really need to take a few days and look at it and see if there's anything cool to be learned from it. Your suggestions are invited!
But I hate to leave you with a skimpy little Game Report. So here's a sample of what we can do. In their 52 games, the Blue Jays have come to bat 456 times (12 times they did not need to bat in the ninth inning.) This table tells you how many times the Jays have scored in those innings and in what quantities. We can do this for the other team, because preventing big innings is a large part of winning - we can look at how often they win when they have a six-run inning (surprise! all the time) and so on and so forth...
| Runs Scored | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | 4th | 5th | 6th | 7th | 8th | 9th | How Often |
| 6 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 3 |
| 5 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 5 |
| 4 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 5 |
| 3 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 15 |
| 2 | 3 | 6 | 3 | 5 | 6 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 41 |
| 1 | 5 | 8 | 9 | 5 | 4 | 6 | 12 | 5 | 9 | 63 |
| 0 | 40 | 36 | 38 | 37 | 40 | 36 | 33 | 39 | 25 | 324 |
Isn't it a little startling just how many innings are scoreless?
