Extra Innings
Baseball has no draws, so a tied game keeps playing whole innings until somebody is ahead at the end of one.
What it actually is. If the score is level after nine innings the teams play a tenth, and if it is still level a eleventh, and so on. Each extra inning is complete: the visiting team hits, then the home team, and the game ends the moment the home team goes ahead or the inning ends with one side in front. Since 2020 the regular season starts each extra inning with a runner already on second base, which is intended to end games faster. The postseason does not use that rule.
What somebody who knows the game gets out of it. The free runner changed extra innings from a war of attrition into a series of one inning strategy problems, and it made the bunt briefly rational again: a man on second with nobody out is one of the few spots where trading an out for a base does not obviously lose. It also changed bullpen construction, because the old requirement to carry an arm who could throw three innings in the fourteenth largely went away.
The numbers worth knowing. Around eight or nine percent of games go to extras. Before the free runner rule, games reaching the fifteenth inning happened a few dozen times a season across the league; they now barely happen at all. A team starting an inning with a runner on second and nobody out scores at least one run more than half the time.
What people get wrong about it. The visiting team scoring in the top of an extra inning does not end the game. The home team still hits, which is the asymmetry that makes extra innings interesting: the road team has to guess how many runs is enough, and the home team knows exactly what it needs.
At Little League and travel ball. Youth tournaments use a version of the same idea called the international tiebreaker, usually a runner on second and sometimes the last batted out placed there, because a field has to be handed to the next game. Many pool games are simply allowed to end tied, which surprises families every single season.
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