by David Fleitz

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dlfleitz@wcnet.org

The play by play information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at 20 Sunset Rd., Newark, DE 19711.

In his new book, the New Historical Baseball Abstract, Bill James suggested that there are fewer blowout games nowadays than there were in the past.  James feels that with advances in playing skill, evening out of talent, and the general evolution of the game itself, that the best teams and the worst teams are not as far apart as they used to be.  Therefore, there are probably fewer blowout games now than there were in the past.

I decided to take a look and see if that’s true.

I took a “blowout” to mean that one team beats the other by 10 runs or more.  I then got the game logs from retrosheet.org for every fifth year from 1905-2000.  (I used only AL and NL, not Federal League, data for the 1915 season.)

I plotted the data on the above graph.  Here’s what I found:

1. From 1940 to the late 1990s, the percentage of blowout games remained under four percent.  That means that fewer than one in every 25 games was a blowout, with one team beating the other by 10 runs or more.
2. Blowouts were less common in the dead ball era, but jumped in the 1930s, reaching 5.94% of all games in 1935.
3. The number went down during the war, went up again after, and went far down in the 1960s.  Fewer than 2% of all games in 1965 were blowouts.  The number rose again after the 1969 expansion.
4. Blowouts are on their way up again, and have been since 1975.  In 2000, 4.5% of games were blowouts, the highest level in 60 years.

It doesn’t appear that there are fewer blowouts because of a higher quality of play, or evolution of player skills, etc.  The number of blowouts seems to track the pattern of run frequency.  There are more in high scoring eras and fewer in low-scoring ones.

Competitive imbalance might have something to do with it.  There were a lot of blowouts in the 1930s because lots of runs were scored, but also because there were some horrible teams then like the Phillies, A’s, Braves, and Browns.  There are more blowouts now – the highest level since 1940 – because lots of runs are scored, and perhaps because bad teams (Devil Rays, Brewers, Expos) get bombed a lot. It could also be that some teams have no chance of competing against superteams like the Yankees.  Perhaps the best teams and the worst are getting farther apart.

On a related note, one-run games have become a little less common.  In baseball history, there have usually been from 29 to 32 percent of all games won by one run.  That figure went down to 27.7 percent in 1995, and was still below 29 percent in 2000.

So, anyway, Bill James was wrong.  We don’t see fewer blowouts now.  We see more than there have been since the 1930s, and they seem to be increasing.