Nippon Professional Baseball
In the Japanese professional baseball leagues, as of 2011, games are limited to a maximum of 12 innings in the regular season and the playoffs, with an additional time limit of three and a half hours for games tied after the ninth inning in the regular season. Games that reach the limit are officially declared ties and are reflected as such in the team's record. In postseason play, the game will be replayed from the top of the first, 0-0, as an entirely new game, leading to seven game series that can go on for eight or even more games. On November 6, 2010 the record for longest Japan Series game was set. The Chiba Lotte Marines and the Chunichi Dragons played 15 innings totaling 5 hours and 43 minutes. The game ended a 2-2 tie leading to a game 7 in which the Chiba Lotte Marines won.
Read more about this topic: Extra Innings
Famous quotes containing the words professional and/or baseball:
“Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention. The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Baseball is the religion that worships the obvious and gives thanks that things are exactly as they seem. Instead of celebrating mysteries, baseball rejoices in the absence of mysteries and trusts that, if we watch what is laid before our eyes, down to the last detail, we will cultivate the gift of seeing things as they really are.”
—Thomas Boswell, U.S. sports journalist. “The Church of Baseball,” Baseball: An Illustrated History, ed. Geoffrey C. Ward, Knopf (1994)