Opening Day and the 162 Game Season
162 games in about 186 days, played in series rather than one at a time, which is why nothing that happens in one night matters much.
What it actually is. The regular season runs from late March to the end of September, 162 games for every club. Games are played in series of two to four against the same opponent, grouped into homestands and road trips. Since 2023 every club plays every other club at least once, so there is a balanced element that did not exist before.
What somebody who knows the game gets out of it. 162 games is the reason baseball analysis looks different from other sports. A season is long enough that a team's record converges on its true quality, so run differential predicts future wins better than record does, and a hot week means almost nothing. It is also why a great team wins about sixty percent of its games and a terrible one about forty, a narrower band than any other major sport, and why single elimination playoff baseball is close to a coin flip regardless of who is better.
The numbers worth knowing. 162 games, roughly 186 days, 81 home and 81 away. A hundred wins is an excellent season. About ten runs of run differential is worth one win, which is the Pythagorean relationship.
What people get wrong about it. A great team loses sixty games. That fact is what makes baseball's regular season honest and its postseason unpredictable at the same time, and it is why nobody who understands the sport treats a division winner losing a five game series as evidence they were not good.
At Little League and travel ball. A travel season is 40 to 60 games in tournaments across seven months, which is far too small a sample to rank players by and far too many games for young arms if it is not managed. The Lineup Lab on this site says so explicitly: under 40 plate appearances, treat any youth batting line as a coin flip.
Batter's Eye: look up anything in baseball