Q. What is the most Big Games ever played by a team in a season?
A. 53, by the Dodgers in 1962.
Q. What is the fewest?
A. There are several teams every season which play no big games at all. Teams that are out of the pennant race by the first of August just never play Big Games, as this system defines a Big Game.
Q. Were there any such teams in 2013?
A. There were 12 of them—which is very unusual. There are always some teams that don’t play any big games, but 12 is a high number.
Q. What were those teams?
A. The Astros, White Sox, Twins, Angels, and Blue Jays in the American League, and the Giants, Padres, Cubs, Brewers, Mets, Phillies and Marlins in the National League. The unusual one is the Angels, because the Angels finished 78-84, and a team that close to .500 usually gets to a few Big Games before they are wiped out. But the Angels were 16 games under .500 in mid-August, then rallied toward respectability after the race was already over.
Q. Who played the most?
A. In 2013?
Q. Yes.
A. The Cardinals. 40.
Q. What is a normal average?
A. 12, 13 per team per season.
Q. Has that changed over time?
A. It’s gone up a little because of the increased number of teams and games, which just increases all of the numbers. We’ve gone from 16 teams to 30 and from 154 games to 162; of course that increases the number of Big Games that turn up.
Q. What is the most ever played in a league?
A. 337, by the National League in 2007. Down-to-the-wire pennant races in all three divisions. The Phillies beat the Mets by one game in the East, with Atlanta staying in the race until the third week of September. The Cubs beat the Brewers by two games in the Central, and the Diamondbacks finished just one game ahead of both the Rockies and the Giants in the NL West. The Diamondbacks and Giants thus tied for the Wild Card, necessitating a playoff before the playoffs. No team in the entire league finished 20 games behind the first-place team—whereas in 2013, five teams in each league finished more than 20 games out. And when you finish 20 games out, generally speaking, you don’t play any Big Games.
Q. What other leagues had a large numbers of Big Games?
A. National League in 2001, 297. Again, close races in all three divisions.
Q. What is the highest total for a single pennant race?
A. 220, for the American League in 1967, followed by 201, for the National League in 1965. Followed by the National League in 1966, 1963, and 1964. Wonderful pennant races every season.
Q. What is the lowest total, for a league?
A. Well. . .the strike seasons.
Q. Other than the strike seasons?
A. The American League in 1958 had only 35 Big Games all year, all eight teams. The Yankees won by ten games, but that’s misleading because the Yankees were under .500 from August first to the end of the season. The race was over by early August; the Yankees just coasted in.
Q. The numbers have gone up, over time?
A. Up and down. In the 1960s there were, in retrospect, a series of quite remarkable pennant races.
The American League in 1964 and the National League in 1965 and 1966 had terrific pennant races, but the narrative of those races is undermined by a predictable outcome. If you take the names off of the teams, the American League in 1964 had an amazing race, with three teams finishing with 99, 98 and 97 wins. But the Yankees won it, which transforms the whole thing into a yawner, whereas if the White Sox had won it, it would be a classic. The National League in 1965, even more so; the Braves finished in fifth place, at 86-76, and the Braves were in the race with two weeks to go. The Phillies finished only a half-game behind the Braves. Half the league was in the pennant race and there were a lot of odd and interesting things that happened, but the Dodgers won it, so it became just another season, just another Dodger pennant.
I was young then, and I just assumed that this was the way baseball was; there were great pennant races every year. Never thought about it. In the 1960s the average team played just over 14 Big Games per season, but this number dropped sharply in the 1970s. In retrospect, the 1969 split into divisions markedly reduced the number of Big Games, and drained the excitement out of the pennant races. What tended to happen, more years than not, was that there would be two good teams in the league, but one would be in the East and the other would be in the West, so there would be no pennant race. With two six-team divisions, you just absolutely did not get those wonderful three- and four-team pennant races that we had in the 1960s.
The 1980s were about like the 1970s, with an average of about 11 Big Games per team per season. . .lower because of the 1981 strike, but slightly higher if you throw out the 1981 strike.
Q. So did the Wild Card solve that problem?
A. It did. It took me a long time to understand this, and I never understood it fully until I did this study, but the Wild Card system did increase the number of Big Games per team back to about what it had been before the split into divisions in 1969. This came at a cost, because what often happens is that the best teams in the league sew up their divisions early and play few Big Games, but the second- and third-place teams continue to play Big Games until the last couple of days of the season. It might be better to have the BEST teams playing Big Games, but that’s not the way it is.
But anyway, the number of Big Games per team per season is back now to a bigger number, with the Wild Card, and since the number of teams is larger, the number of Big Games is larger. By my count there have been 4,738 regular season Big Games in the last ten years, whereas in the 1970s and the 1980s there were less than 2800 per decade.
Q. Could it be too big?
A. It could be too big, yes. There is a "size of the human mind" problem at some point. If you have four teams focused in a single pennant race, like the American League in 1967, your mind can handle that, whereas if you have eight teams competing in three different pennant races, like the National League in 2007, you can’t wrap your head around all of the details, so it loses significance. We lose the sense of these being mythic events, Yastrzemski’s hot streak, Mauch starting Bunning on short rest, etc. Roy Oswalt can pitch like Bob Gibson, but he doesn’t become Bob Gibson because people don’t have a clear, uncluttered view of what is happening.
Q. How many Big Games did the Kansas City A’s play?
A. None. By my system, the A’s in their thirteen years in Kansas City never played a Big Game. Whereas the Dodgers, from 1953 through 1962, played 330 Big Games in a ten-year span.