Rain Delay and Suspended Games
When a game stops, whether it counts depends on how far it got.
What it actually is. The umpire crew chief controls the field once the game starts and can pause play for weather. If the game cannot resume, what happens depends on how much has been played: a game is official once five innings are complete, or four and a half if the home team is ahead. An official game that is stopped is a final result. A game stopped earlier is either resumed later or replayed from the start, depending on the league's rules.
What somebody who knows the game gets out of it. The five inning threshold shapes managing on a bad weather night. A team ahead has an incentive to work quickly and get to the official mark; a team behind has an incentive to do the opposite, which is why umpires watch for stalling on rainy evenings and why the rulebook gives them power to forfeit a game over it. In the majors, most incomplete games are now resumed rather than replayed, which removes some of that incentive but not all of it.
The numbers worth knowing. Five innings, or four and a half with the home team leading, is the line for an official game. Delays are measured in hours and a delay over about two hours usually ends the night.
What people get wrong about it. A player's statistics from a suspended game count from the moment they happened, and the game resumes with the exact situation preserved, including the count. A player who has since been traded cannot come back and finish his at bat, which produces a handful of strange box scores every few years.
At Little League and travel ball. Youth tournaments almost never resume anything. A pool game stopped by weather is usually recorded at the score after the last complete inning, or dropped entirely and settled by tiebreakers, and lightning policies force a fixed wait from the last strike regardless of what the sky is doing. Families should expect that a Saturday washout is settled by a rules committee, not by baseball.
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