Jesse Walker
Jesse Walker writes about baseball through data. He played outfield in high school, found his real position behind a spreadsheet, and hasn't stopped building models since.
Orioles 18, Rockies 0. The game that proved boredom is measurable. Win probability proves it.
July 26, 2025
A 2-1 pitcher's duel in 11 innings feels tense. An 18-0 blowout feels dead. We assume the latter is boring because someone won decisively. But that's backward. Boredom is win probability. When the outcome stops being uncertain, the game stops mattering, whether you're in the 3rd inning or the 9th.
The Orioles' obliteration of the Rockies on July 26 hit 99% Baltimore win probability by the 4th inning. Nothing after that mattered. Every pitch, every at-bat, every inning was dead time. That's statistical theater.
This is also a story about the Rockies' 2025 season. Historically, catastrophically bad. One of 3 teams since 1940 to allow 1,000+ runs. And this one game, where a position player took the mound and a team allowed 18 runs, is the clearest lens into what went wrong.
Baltimore's lineup went perfect. Every. Single. Starter. Reached base and scored. Systemic collapse on the other side of the plate.
Tyler O'Neill hit a home run and a single, walked twice, drove in 3 runs. Gunnar Henderson and Coby Mayo each hit 2-run doubles in the 7th.
Colorado resorted to position player pitching by the 8th. DH Kyle Farmer took the mound. By then the game's fate had been sealed for 4 innings.
The team surrendered.
The Rockies allowed 1,000+ runs in 2025. One of only 3 teams since 1940 to reach that mark. Their run differential was the worst in 125 years of MLB; it wasn't close.
This game was the logical conclusion of a season where the organization had no margin for error and made every possible error anyway.
A position player on the mound became the symbol of it.
The 2025 season was defined by offense declining to historic lows. League batting average sat at .243 (the lowest since the mound was lowered in 1968). Strikeout rate hovered around 23-24% of all at-bats. There were zero no-hitters all season, and only 29 complete games.
Average starter innings pitched per game dropped to 5.21 IP, down from 5.88 in the 2000-2016 era. Teams burned through relievers like fuel. Position player pitching became so routine it was called "a farce of statistics" by mid-season.
Into this environment, the Rockies' collapse looked even starker. While the rest of baseball struggled to score, Colorado couldn't stop bleeding runs.
The 2025 season saw attendance collapse at storied franchises. St. Louis Cardinals drew 2.25 million fans (their lowest non-COVID total since 1984). Minnesota Twins sank to 1.768 million, down from historical averages around 2.2-2.5 million in good years.
When a team is mathematically eliminated by July, when every game feels predetermined, people stop showing up. And when multiple teams hit that threshold, the entire league notices.
The Orioles-Rockies game on July 26 was a symptom. A game so thoroughly over by the 4th inning that 90,000 empty seats across the league started to make sense.
Sports betting odds have a concept called "win probability." At any point in a game, bookmakers assign a likelihood to each team's victory. In close games, win probability swings dramatically. A home run in the 7th of a 1-run game might shift WPA from 40% to 75% in seconds.
In the Orioles-Rockies game, win probability hit 99% Baltimore by the 4th inning. Everything after was statistical dead time. Zero uncertainty from pitch 80 onward. The score being lopsided is the effect, the certainty arriving early is the cause.
Contrast this to a theoretical World Series Game 7 in the 9th inning, down 1 run, bases loaded. Win probability swings 30 percentage points with each pitch. That's engagement. That's care.
The game that bored us most was the one where we knew the ending earliest.
The most boring baseball game is the one where the outcome becomes certain too soon. Measure boredom by win probability, not by runs.
Colorado arrived at historic failure systematically. A roster built for an era that no longer existed, pitching depth that didn't exist, and luck that evaporated entirely.
By July, they were mathematically hopeless. By August, they were experimenting with position players on the mound. By September, fans had stopped coming. The Orioles-Rockies game on July 26 was just the clearest, most brutal expression of a season already decided.
In a league with 30 teams, one team getting this historically bad raises a question: Is the system working? When a team can be this comprehensively worse than every other competitor, what does that say about parity, salary cap enforcement, and the basic health of baseball?
The game itself (18-0, position players pitching, every batter scoring) will be forgotten by April 2026. But the question it raises won't be.
Win Probability Added (WPA) is calculated as the shift in a team's probability of winning after each play. A game where WPA plateaus early indicates reduced competitive tension and lower audience engagement.