The Ninth

A real game. The home team is 1 run down in the bottom of the ninth, nobody out and nobody on, with the pitcher who really came in and the lineup that was really due up. Three outs to find a run.

Score one and you have tied it and the game goes to extras. Score two and you win it where you stand. Make three outs and it is over.

• Swing away— let him hit. The outcome is drawn from what really happened when a hitter of his quality batted in that exact base-out state.
• Bunt— trade an out for a base, or try to beat it out. Offered wherever real managers have called for one often enough to measure.
• Send the runner— send him while the pitch is in the air. It does not use up a plate appearance, so the same batter is still standing there afterwards.

A call is only offered when at least 200 real occurrences of it stand behind that exact state. Stealing home with the bases loaded has happened; drawing from a dozen instances of it would be dressing an anecdote up as a distribution.

Every other simulation on this site had to be calibrated against a fitted model. Baseball is different in kind: the situation is enumerable. There are eight arrangements of runners and three out counts, and Retrosheet records what actually happened next, several hundred thousand times, for each of them.

So an outcome is drawn from the real distribution of what followed — measured across 8.97 million plays from 1974 to 2024. After each call the board shows what the measurement said every available call was worth from that state, as a chance of scoring at least one more run this inning, so the argument about whether you were right is settleable rather than a matter of taste.

The received wisdom is that the sacrifice bunt is always wrong. Over 8.97 million plays it is more complicated than that, and the complication is the game. Chance of scoring at least one more run in the inning:

• Runner on first, nobody out — swing 41.9%, bunt 42.3%
• Runner on first, one out — swing 26.9%, bunt 23.8%
• Runner on second, nobody out — swing 61.2%, bunt 67.4%
• First and second, nobody out — swing 61.8%, bunt 67.3%
• First and second, one out — swing 41.6%, bunt 32.4%

Bunting trades runs for the chance of one run, and one run is exactly what a team down one in the ninth needs. It is right in some states, wrong in others, and expensive with one already out.

When the inning ends, the game shows what really happened in it — the real batters, the real plays and the real number of runs. About a third of these innings were walked off for real, so if you went down in order you are in good company, and if you won it you may have done better than the team did.

520 innings are on file, all of them one run down with nobody out and nobody on.

A walk-off outranks a tie and a tie outranks a loss, and then how near the rest came separates them — losing with two on is not the same as three up and three down. The shared leaderboard shows it as a percentage, the same shape Sunday Drive uses.

One inning a day, the same for everybody. Unlimited deals another whenever you want more.