How often does the team that scores first win in MLB?
The team that scores first wins 67% of MLB games. In a sport where the average game has fewer than nine total runs, drawing first blood is a real, durable edge, worth about 17 points over a coin flip.
Low-scoring sports reward the early lead more than high-scoring ones, because there are fewer possessions left to erase it. A run in the first is a bigger share of the night's offense than a bucket is of an NBA game, so it sticks.
Across 6,319 games where a team scored first. Two out of three times, they held on.
It is also why first-inning offense is worth paying attention to as more than a novelty. The teams that get on the board early are not just fun to watch, they are winning about two of every three games they lead. It connects directly to the first-inning market, where we grade every model on whether a run scores at all.
Every number here comes from our own game database: 6,321 MLB games since 2024, rebuilt nightly. We compute rates across all qualifying games, never a cherry-picked window. This is descriptive history, not a prediction, and it updates on its own.
Last recomputed July 8, 2026.