Baseball is one of the most popular sports to bet on worldwide, but if you weren’t brought up watching it, it has a few very specific rules and conventions you should know about before wagering on it.
One of the first is understanding how baseball innings work, how many of them are in a game, and why. Let’s also look at why the number of innings came about, what happens in a tied game and how long the longest game in baseball history went on for.
What Are Innings in Baseball
Baseball innings are a portion of the game as a whole. What portion? As we’ll soon see, in the vast majority of cases they make up 1/9 of the game, seeing as there are generally nine innings in a game of baseball.
Suppose you’re engaging in some Major League Baseball betting and it’s a game between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.
At the start of the match, let’s say the Yankees will bat first and will then try to score as many runs as possible before getting three ‘outs’: three batters who have got out by being caught, having three strikes against them or via the other methods of dismissal.
Once three Yankees batters are out, it’s the Red Sox’s players’ turn to bat and just like with the Yankees, they’ll try to score as many runs as possible before three of their batters get out.
Once three batters from each team - six in total - have got out, that’s one of the innings completed.
On average, an inning in baseball lasts around 20 or 30 minutes.
If the batters keep going, scoring runs, without getting out and take longer than usual by adjusting their gloves or taking numerous practice swings, it could go well beyond the 30 minutes.
Alternatively, it could last just 10 or 15 minutes if the first few batters all get out straight away, rather than making first base, or getting a Home Run.
How do Innings Work in Baseball (compared to other sports)?
The last part of the section above illustrates an important point about baseball innings: their length is restricted by players getting out, rather than time restrictions.
In this sense, they’re very different to an ‘over’ in baseball’s ‘English’ cousin: cricket.
In cricket, an over is made up of six legal balls, or deliveries, to be precise. Once those six legal deliveries (if a delivery isn’t legal, it has to be bowled again) have been bowled, that’s the end of the over, irrespective of how many batters got out.
So, an inning in baseball is more similar to a ‘game’ in a tennis match. At the start of it, we don’t know how long it’s going to take: we only know that it will be over when one player wins the next point after getting to 40, or both players get to 40, and one then goes on to win two points in a row.
Why Is Baseball Nine Innings?
Those who enjoy to bet on baseball will be well familiar with the fact that pro matches last nine innings. But why is baseball nine innings?
The reasons are historical. When the game first started to be played at a serious level at the start of the 1800s, it was played until 21 ‘aces’ had been scored by either side. Once they were, that was the ball game! And if you’re wondering what exactly ‘aces’ are, they’re what we now call runs.
That all changed in 1857 when Alexander Cartwright decided that an increase in the number of official baseball teams and the number of organised games of baseball around the country required rules and regulations to be put into place so that there was greater consistency in how they were played, especially when it came to professional competitions.
It simply wasn’t practical to have matches whose length was, quite frankly, anyone’s guess. The only way to ensure games were completed within a reasonable time was to limit their length, based on a finite number of innings, which was decided on as being 9 baseball innings. Nine also became the number of players per side, whereas before, it could vary.
One of the important side effects of the introduction of the nine-innings rule was that it meant that pitchers knew they’d be pitching to 27 batters over the course of the match, rather than an unknown number.
This helped pitchers manage their workloads by knowing how many balls they’d have to pitch when this was the case, as well as help the teams themselves know how many pitchers they needed to recruit for the roster and what level of quality each one needed to be, seeing as they’d be regularly rotated.
How Long Is Nine Innings of Baseball
How long is 9 innings of baseball isn’t quite ‘how long is a piece of string?’ but unlike some other sports like basketball or soccer, the duration of nine innings, or the duration of a baseball game if you prefer, isn’t set in stone, either.
Back in the 1900s, a game tended to last two and a half hours, but the average duration kept on going up due to various factors, including more pitching changes and more timeouts, to the extent that by 2016, the average was closer to just over three hours.
Deciding enough was enough, American baseball’s powers-that-be implemented changes that resulted in quicker games. These included a reduced number of timeouts for the batter and the introduction of the Pitchcom device, speeding up communications between pitcher and catcher.
By the end of the 2023 season, the average duration of nine innings of baseball was down to two hours and 40 minutes as a result of all these changes.
What Happens When a Game Is Tied at The End of Nine Innings in Baseball?
A crucial question when betting on baseball competitions. First up, if one team has scored more runs at the end of the nine innings, then once again, that’s the ball game!
But when it’s tied after nine innings, an extra inning will be played. If one team scores two runs in it and the other just one, that’s the game over.
If they’re still tied after the extra inning, an extra one will carry on being played until one side outscores the other.
The Number of Batters per Inning
So far, we’ve looked at such questions as: how long is 9 innings of baseball? And why is baseball 9 innings? Next up: how many batters per inning in baseball?
If you’ve been following things closely so far, you should be aware that the answer to the question of the minimum number of batters per inning is six. That would be if the three batters from each side got out straight away during the inning without making it to first base.
As for the maximum number, there isn’t one. If a team keeps on scoring runs, resulting in new batters constantly coming in, it could be as many as six or seven for one team during that inning. And if the other team then does the same, it could end up being 14 or 15 batters per inning, though that’s highly unusual.
The Length of Extra Innings
We’ve already discussed that the average length of a baseball inning is 20 to 30 minutes.
So, if one team outscores the other during the (first) extra inning, then that would be the length of time taken to play extra innings.
However, if three extra innings were needed to find a winner because the scores were still tied after the first two extra ones, then an additional hour or an hour and a half may be needed to split the teams.
So, how long is an extra inning in baseball? Answer: it depends!
How Many Innings in a College Baseball Game
The simple answer is nine. For the most part, the rules that apply to professional baseball are the same as those that apply to college baseball.
Similar to pro baseball, an extra inning will be played if the scores are tied after nine innings, and then another if it’s still tied after that, and so on.
There is, however, an exception: the mercy rule.
If a team is winning by 10 or more runs after seven (sometimes eight) baseball innings, the rule is in place to avoid further pain/embarrassment to the side that is so far behind in the game and highly unlikely to recover from the deficit. So, in some cases, there may be just seven or eight innings in a college game, rather than the standard nine.
The mercy rule can also come into play for high school baseball games.
Longest Baseball Games Ever
Eight hours of cricket in one day is par for the course, given that’s the time making up one day of a five-day Test match, while ODIs, where both teams bat a maximum of 50 overs each on the same day, are scheduled to last a similar amount of time, too.
But baseball isn’t cricket, as we know from the fact that these days, the average game lasts around two hours and 40 minutes. So when a match back in 1984 took eight hours and six minutes to be completed, it was unsurprisingly a record-breaking one at the time and a record that remains to this day.
The game between the Chicago White Sox and the Milwaukee Brewers started on May 8, 1984. After 17 innings and with the scores tied, it was suspended at 1 am as per the American League rule determining that was the cut-off time for pro baseball matches.
When they came back the following night to complete proceedings, a well-rested Tom Seaver pitched the top of the 25th inning without conceding any runs, opening the door to Harold Baines to become a hero.
It was not an opportunity the 2019 Hall-of-Famer was going to turn down. He duly hit a home run, or a walk-off home run to be precise, in what was his 12th hit of the game, the first 11 resulting in just one hit and two walks.
A typically emotionless Baines told the Associated Press later, though it was noted that the high-fives he gave his teammates to celebrate the win were rare for a man who just liked to get to business with a minimum fuss:
Winning the game is my only goal.
By the time he hit that winning home run, 752 pitches had been thrown.
Back in 1964, a game between the Mets and the Giants had gone on for seven hours and 23 minutes, which was the previous American baseball record before Baines, Seaver, and the others broke it.
What’s really interesting, though, is that a 1920 game between the Brooklyn Robins (later the Dodgers) and the Boston Braves saw 26 innings being played, one more than in the famous White Sox and Brewers one.
However, despite cramming in one more inning, it only took the players three hours and 50 minutes to get there, a real indication of how quickly games moved on back then.
