MLB should consider adopting a mercy rule

There have been some people around baseball, mainly on baseball broadcasts, who have floated the idea of using a “mercy rule” in MLB games, similar to what’s used in international competition.

To wit: If a team is trailing by 10 or more runs after seven innings, by mutual agreement of the managers the game could be stopped.

I’m coming around. This might actually be a good idea.

Let’s have a look at how many games might be affected by this sort of rule change. I looked at games from 2021 and thus far in 2022, so that’s 2,429 total games from last year and 999 games so far in 2022, a fairly large sample size.

There were 98 games decided by 10 or more runs in 2021 (plus three games that had that large a run differential that were second games of doubleheaders and thus seven innings by rule, so I didn’t count those). That’s four percent of all games.

A team had a lead of 10 runs or more after seven innings in 60 of those 98, or 61.2 percent. But more importantly, that’s 60 games out of 2,429, or 2.4 percent of all games played last year.

Thus far in 2022, there have been 41 MLB games decided by 10 or more runs. This is essentially identical to the four percent from last year. Of the 42, 25 have had that 10-run spread after seven innings, including last night’s Cubs/Pirates game. That’s 60 percent of the overall 10-run games, and again 2.4 percent of all games played to date this year, so those percentages seem to be holding. I’m going to make an assumption that these numbers will hold long-term.