Each day, Thursday, October 19, 1972, the players wake up, start their day, prepare for their game, and experience the agony of a 1-run loss or the joy of a 1-run win. Each night, the simulator generates a record of what occurred during that timeline. Each day, the players wake up, and once again it is Thursday, October 19, 1972.
In the 1972 World Series, the National League champion Cincinnati Reds faced off with the American League champion Oakland Athletics. The series, dubbed the hairs versus the squares, pitted Reds manager Sparky Anderson's Big Red Machine (a clean cut crew of players like Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench) against Athletics manager Dick Williams and the Swingin' A's, a colorful lineup of players with more creative facial hair and full of All-Stars, MVPs, Cy Young winners, and future Hall of Famers.
The Athletics carried a 2-1 lead going into the pivotal Game 4. The game was a pitchers duel between the two aces of each team, Don Gullett and Ken Holtzman. The game was tied going into the ninth, and the Reds scored a run to come out on top, only to give up two runs in the bottom of the ninth. The Athletics scored the winning run on an RBI single by center fielder Angel Mangual.
More about the 1972 World Series →
Watch Game 4 of the 1972 World Series on YouTube →
Oakland carried a 2-1 lead in the series going into Game 4. The outcome of Game 4 would have a huge psychological impact on the remaining games: if the Athletics won, the Reds would be forced to win 3 straight elimination games; if the Reds won, they would tie up the series, reset themselves, and have the chance to clinch at home.
What if the Big Red Machine had scored just one more run? What if the game went to extra innings? What if both pitchers had a rare bad inning, and gave up multi-run rallies? One pitch, one substitution, could make all the difference. World Series pitchers duels are won and lost on the details.
Imagine the infinite timelines that flow through Game 4. Each timeline begins with the same batters and the same pitchers in the same lineup order; but each timeline holds the promise of a new outcome for Cincinnati.
To dip into the pool of infinite timelines for Cincinnati, we simulated Game 4 of the 1972 World Series using Out of the Park Baseball Simulator. Each simulation used the real Game 4 lineups and starting positions for each team. Each team had the real Game 4 starting pitchers on the mound in each simulation.
More about Out of the Park Baseball simulations for Infinite Cincinnati →
The following table is a list of timelines, winners and losers, and final score.
Click "Box Score" button to view that timeline's game recap, WPA graph, and hitting and pitching summaries.
Click "Play By Play" to view that timeline's pitch-by-pitch, play-by-play log of the game.
Because 6 of the 7 games in the 1972 World Series were 1-run games, we constrained each simulation to 1-run outcomes. We simulated alternate timelines in the format of 5 best-of-7 series between Cincinnati and Oakland.
Oakland took the series overall, at 19-16, only losing one of the best-of-seven series.
Each best-of-7 series utilizes a strategy engine from a different decades: