Any baseball historians here?

Michigan

Anyone know why an official baseball game is nine innings instead of an even number like ten?. Only thing I could find is:


March 7, 1857 in History

Event:
Baseball decides 9 innings constitutes an official game, not 9 runs


Apparently in the very early days a game was considered over when a team scored 9 runs, maybe that caused marathon games
so they decided to shorten it to 9 innnings? Just a guess.

WinPitcher

They wanted to match the innings with the amount of players.

9 players on the field, nine inning game.

before that they decided before hand how many innings a game would be. 7, 8 9 10 11 etc.

best i can come up with anyway.

Actually an official game is 4.5 innings.


Steve

cubbie72

No one really knows exactly why baseball eventually settled on nine innings. However, if you find questions like this interesting, there's a fascinating new two-book volume out by Peter Morris called A Game Of Inches, which researches minutae on everything to why there are nine innings in a game, how windups developed, how moden batting stances developed, and so on. According to Morris, the nine inning requirement appears to be based on a simple relationship to the number of players in a game, so Steve's guess is about as anybody can figure.

Interestingly, according to the 1845 rules of the first team to play by recognizable "base ball" rules, the New York Knickerbockers, the game would be playd until the first team scored 21 "aces" (what we now call "runs"). The nine inning innovation came some time between 1845 and the mid-1850s.

John

diamondman

The players made up the rule so everyone got at least 3 at bats per game, at least that is what the drunk sitting next to me at the bar last night said.