Small Ball and the Big Inning
Manufacturing a run with bunts, steals and moving runners.
How it actually works. Small ball means bunting runners over, stealing, hitting behind runners and squeezing: a run assembled out of several deliberate pieces. The big inning approach means not spending outs at all, taking walks, hitting for power, and accepting that most innings produce nothing in exchange for the ones that produce four.
Why it is done, and when it is wrong. The arithmetic mostly favors the big inning and the situation sometimes does not, and knowing which situation you are in is the entire skill. Outs are the scarce resource in baseball, there are exactly twenty seven of them and no clock to run out, so a strategy that spends them to gain bases is spending the only thing you cannot get more of. But run distribution is not run average. When one run wins the game, the strategy that maximizes the chance of exactly one run beats the strategy that maximizes the expected total, and that is the whole legitimate case for small ball. It lives in the ninth inning of a tie game and it does not live in the second.
What people get wrong about it. The version of this argument you hear on a broadcast is usually about aesthetics dressed as tactics. A team that bunts a lot is described as playing the game the right way, and a team that walks and homers is described as station to station, and neither phrase contains any information about whether the approach was correct for the score.
At Little League and travel ball. The balance shifts at youth level and it shifts toward small ball, because the defense converts fewer batted balls and because power is rare. A youth offense that puts the ball in play and runs hard scores more than one built to wait for extra base hits.
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