Content Creator Tony is back with TonySPN, his recurring series covering the wide world of sports.

On Wednesday, we ran a round called “How You Play the Game,” in which we asked you to recall how different sports are broken down into components. For example, here are the sports we asked about:

Major League Baseball: Nine innings
NHL Hockey: Three periods
MLS Soccer: Two halves
PGA Tournaments: Four rounds (or 72 holes)
Olympic Softball: Seven innings
Men’s Lacrosse: Four Quarters

Judging by how well my teams did at Falling Knife Brewing Co., we didn’t get nearly as evil or wild with the round as we could have. What components make up, say, a cricket game? Or water polo? Or what about those new-fangled eSports I keep hearing about? The gloves are coming off on this Friday Know-It-All!

You can have some bonus trivia today if you want to guess these for yourself, here are the sports that we’ll be discussing. Use your noodles and give us your best shot on these:

10-Pin Bowling
Cricket World Cup
Olympic Curling
“Counter-Strike: Global Offensive” (IEM Cologne Grand Final)
World Series of Darts Final
Rugby
Water polo

In order for you to not see the answers before your guesses are in, let’s take a bit of a detour and talk about the baseball games with the most innings ever. That ties in nicely with our subject.

Baseball, at least by the rules of today, can not end in a tie. One notable exception from this century is the 2002 All-Star Game, when both sides ran out of pitchers by the 11th inning. That might actually be a good topic for a future TonySPN. Stay tuned.

But way back when MLB was young, ties were possible, though rare. One case of this was in 1920, when the Brooklyn Robins and Boston Braves went 26 innings before umpires ended the game as it was getting dark. Remember, night games weren’t invented until the Great Depression.

This struck the “New York Times” as quite amusing, as the sports column noted “[Umpire Barry McCormick] remembered that he had an appointment pretty soon with a succulent beefsteak….He held out one hand as a test and decided that in the gloaming it resembled a Virginia Ham. He knew it wasn’t a Virginia Ham and became convinced that it was too dark to play ball. Thereupon, he called game.”

I know that’s not particularly funny a century later, but you have to remember that humor wasn’t invented for another 40 years or so.

Anyway, this game took just 3 hours and 50 minutes to play, or seven minutes less than Game 5 of last year’s World Series, which lasted nine impossibly long innings. Good thing they’re doing those rules changes. Baseball is good again.

For those curious about the modern MLB record, the White Sox and Brewers went 25 innings in a 1984 game, and the Cardinals and Mets did the same in 1974. The infinitely quotable Yogi Berra managed the Mets, getting thrown out in the 20th inning, but it was another Yankees icon who had the best line about the game. Joe Torre, who managed the Yankees to several World Series wins (I don’t want to look up the exact number—I’d prefer it to be zero) played for St. Louis at the time and said post-game, “That was the fastest 25-inning game I ever played.” Dedicated fans got to leave the stadium at 3:13 AM.

OK, had time to look it over? Great, let’s talk about these components.

Bowling: 10 Frames

We’ll start with bowling, a sport that almost all of us have played before. The name of the components bowling breaks down to are called “frames,” which you may or may not have remembered.

I was hoping to find the etymology behind frames (maybe a reference to framing the pins in formation? I have no idea), but in my search I did discover the existence of the “beer frame.” Apparently, tradition calls for buying a round of beers if you’re the only person in your game to not record a strike in a given frame.

Cricket World Cup: 50 Overs

If you’ve never read a cricket scorecard, you might just ask yourself: What? I’ve had to have on-the-job training to be able to read these, and it took about three weeks to get comfortable with them. It throws a lot at you, but it does make sense.

There are different ways to organize a cricket match, but the way the Cricket World Cup does it is in a format called One Day International (or ODI), which takes about eight hours to complete.

The presence of the word “innings” might confuse you. Don’t worry about it. In cricket, innings are runs, which is probably more confusing than it has to be. Instead of the innings that baseball and softball fans are used to, the game is broken down into overs. “Overs” are sets of six balls thrown by the hurler. Each side in an ODI match gets 50 of them, with one team taking all 50 overs at once before switching between bowling and batting.

Unless a side gets 10 wickets, which would be the equivalent of outs in a baseball and softball game. Ten of these will end a team’s time to bat, regardless of how many overs a team would otherwise have remaining. The scorecard shows the final of the 2019 Cricket World Cup, where both teams played exactly 50 overs, and tied with exactly 241 points. England won in a “super over,” which is each side batting for an over apiece until the tie is broken.

Whew. Let’s check out…

IEM Grand Final, “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive”: (Best of) Five Maps

It’s the ’20s now, and esports are sports. And if you’re looking for esports, “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive” (or “CS:GO” for short) is the one of the most-watched esports in the world. The Intel Extreme Masters is arguably the biggest “CS:GO” tournament in the world, and their Grand Final is divided into five maps. The first to win three is the winner.

A Map in “CS:GO” consists of 30 rounds. One team is made up of terrorists, while the other team is made up of counter-terrorists. In each round, the terrorists get a point for detonating a bomb or eliminating all the counter-terrorists. The counter-terrorists need to either eliminate the terrorists, defuse their bombs, or stall the terrorists until time runs out in order to score. The sides swap after 15 rounds, and the first to 16 points wins the map.

Olympic Curling: 10 Ends

Curling consists of “ends,” where both teams take turns throwing stones from one end of the ice to the other. Simple enough! Each end takes about 15 minutes, so a 10-end game should only set you back fewer than three hours.

World Series of Darts Final: (Best of) 21 Legs

OK, technically, you could call this “one set,” but “21 legs” sounds way cooler, and Wikipedia also says legs, so it’s legs. According to the PDC rules, each leg constitutes a round of 501, which is a race to get enough points in to take your score from 501 to zero. To win the World Series of Darts, you must win 11 legs, which can go all the way to 21. No tennis rules here, you don’t have to win by two.

Rugby: Two Halves

Luckily, rugby is similar to sports like soccer and hockey: pretty universal from tournament to tournament. Even better, you’re in and out in about 90 minutes. Each half has 40 minutes, and halftime is limited to 10 minutes. Sounds grueling to play, but I suppose that’s why I don’t play.

Water polo: Four Periods

Another game with simple and familiar components. The unusual thing about water polo, however, is the length of the games. At the highest levels (the Olympics, the Water Polo World League) each period is only eight minutes long, which makes the full game time 32 minutes.

That doesn’t sound like a lot of time – the NBA has short quarters, though even those are 12 minutes each – but here’s the thing: have you ever tried going all-out at swimming for eight minutes? That’s probably why. Other than that, the extent of my personal experience with water polo is that the ball really hurts when it hits you in the face. I can feel that in my mind almost 20 years later, it haunts me whenever I think of the sport. The water does not soften that blow at all.