A professional baseball game lasts nine innings. However, in some circumstances a regulation baseball game lasts less than nine innings. When two teams are competing and inclement weather prevents the two teams from playing a full game, the game will be considered official if one team is ahead and the losing team has completed batting in five official innings.
Official Game Rules
Major League Baseball considers a regular-season game to be official when four and a half innings have been completed and the home team is winning or five full innings if the visiting team is winning. If rain, snow, hail or other weather conditions prevent a game from continuing after a reasonable waiting period, the game will be considered official. The team that is ahead will be declared the winner.
Statistics
Baseball is a statistics-driven sport. In a game that is shortened by weather, all statistics will count as long as the game has gone four and a half innings and the home team is winning. However, if the game is called off because of poor weather in the middle of the fourth inning, the game does not count and none of the statistics accumulated will count. So, if a batter hit home runs in the first and third innings but the game got rained out in the fourth, those home runs do not count. On the other hand, if a batter comes into a game with a 25-game hitting streak and strikes out once and walks twice before the game gets called in the sixth inning, the streak is over even if the batter did not get what appears to be a full complement of at-bats.
Mechanical Failure
A mechanical failure that prevents a game from being played is not viewed by Major League Baseball the way it views a weather stoppage. For example, the lights may go out in a stadium due to a blackout in the seventh inning with one team leading. Instead of declaring the team that is leading the winner, the umpires will suspend the game and resume play at a later date.
Postseason Play
Baseball changed its rules for rain-shortened games in the postseason after the 2008 World Series. When the fifth game of the World Series between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Philadelphia Phillies was stopped by rain in the sixth inning with the score tied 2-2 in the potentially decisive game -- the Phillies led the World Series 3 games to 1 at that point -- commissioner Bud Selig ruled that the game was suspended and would be picked up from that point. If the Phillies had been leading, Selig would have had no other alternative but to declare the Phillies the winners. Selig did not want baseball to face that scenario again, so baseball changed its rules and declared weather-shortened games would not occur during the postseason. Instead, the game would be suspended and then resumed when the weather cleared.
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