Happy sports equinox! 🎉

The “sports equinox” is when all four major North American men’s professional sports leagues are playing on the same day (MLB, NFL, NHL, and NBA). This first happened on October 17, 1971, and required the World Series to reach a game 7.

While initially they were quite rare, they have been becoming more and more common mainly because of changes to the MLB post season format, which often results in the World Series ending in the final week of October, or even November. This increases the chances for overlap with the other leagues, some of which don’t begin until later in October.

There’s a Boston WordPress meetup tonight, so I won’t be celebrating too hard this year. I’ll definitely be giving the World Series priority while checking in on the NFL game and the Boston Bruins tonight.

My other friend Jake ended up creating a fun little site that allows you to explore this idea. This is the pie that I ended up with.

Here is the table of percentages that I assigned.

Sport	Percentage
Baseball	30% (Boston Red Sox accounting for 40% of that time)
Football	25% (New England Patriots accounting for 15% of that time)
Hockey	20% (Boston Bruins accounting for 50% of that time)
NCAA Basketball	4% (mostly March Madness)
Golf	4%
Formula1	1%
WNBA	1%
Soccer	0.1% (mostly spent telling Felix that baseball is better)

This was surprisingly difficult to construct! Here are some thoughts I had along the way.

• The season length makes this really hard. For example, baseball runs from April till October (sometimes November), and starts in February if you include spring training. This is much longer in contrast to the other major sports. For example, NFL starts in September (training camp begins the end of July) through the start of February. Longer seasons naturally take up more time. How do you account for that?
• Some sports have more games. Baseball plays 162 regular season games while each NFL team plays just 17 games in the regular season. It’s much more difficult to watch all 162 games for a team than it is just 17. But does that mean the piece of the pie is larger because you watch a higher percentage of the games?
• For NFL, I watch the RedZone on most weekends. But I also watch most of the prime time games in full. I’d say the NFL is the league that I watch the highest percentage of all games across the league in a given season because of this.
• The way I watch each sport varies depending on where the season is. For example, I watch more of my favorite teams later in the season and leading up to the playoffs. I watch as much as I can of the playoffs for all the major sports, regardless of who’s playing.

To create the chart, I tried to plot how much time I invest in watching each sport and which are my favorites. If I had to rank my favorites, it would be baseball, hockey, football, basketball. But I spend more time watching football than hockey, so the percentages are flipped in my chart.

I think I’m going to try and come up with a more methodical way of logging what I’m watching so I can create a more accurate chart instead of just going off memory and my impression of my sports fandom. If you’d like to create your own, you can use the site that Jake created. Here is a link to my chart on the site.

Fun Related Facts

While writing this, I learned some interesting facts about the history of the sports equinox.

• There have been 32 sports equinox events in history.
• After the one on October 27, 1985, another equinox did not occur until November 4, 2001, a 16 year gap. This equinox was not originally set to happen, but the week long delay following the 9/11 attacks resulted in overlapping schedules.
• There has been at least 1 equinox every year since 2015.
• The first equinox to occur on a day other than Sunday was November 2, 2009. It was the second and final equinox of the year, and the only time in history that there has been an equinox on consecutive days.
• There have been 7 years with exactly 2 (1972, 1973, 1980, 2009, 2017, 2018, 2021).
• There have been just 2 years with exactly 3 (2002, 2020).
• The only year an MLB regular season game has been played on an equinox was 2020 where all 3 occurred due to late regular season games taking place from a COVID altered schedule.
• Of the 32 total, 23 have been in October, 6 in November, and just 3 in September (see previous bullet point).
• There have been 5 where game 7 of the World Series was played.
• Just 6 have occurred due to the MLB League Championship games overlapping the three other sports instead of the World Series.
• The World Series has been won on a sports equinox 8 times.
  • October 16, 1971 – Pirates beat Orioles in (game 7)
  • October 22, 1972 – Athletics beat Reds (game 7)
  • October 21, 1973 – Athletics beat Mets (game 7)
  • October 27, 1987 – Royals beat Cardinals (game 7)
  • November 4, 2001 – Diamondbacks beat Yankees (game 7)
  • November 1, 2010 – Giants beat Rangers (game 5)
  • November 1, 2015 – Royals beat Mets (game 5)
  • October 27, 2018 – Red Sox beat Dodgers (game 5)

My Birthday

With my birthday falling on October 26th, it’s a prime day for possible equinox. This year, I missed by one day. While writing this post, I discovered some fun sports-related facts about my birthday (as reported by ChatGPT with a low level of verification effort):

• There has never been a sports equinox on my birthday. Though 3 have occurred on October 27th (including today).
• The World Series has ended on my birthday 5 times (1911, 1996, 1997, 2000, and 2005).
• The World Series often ends on the day preceding or following my birthday, a total of 10 times. All but one occurrence has been during my lifetime.
  • 2 times on October 25th (1987, 2003).
  • 8 times on October 27th (1985, 1986, 1991, 1999, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2020)

Your Chart

What does your chart look like? I’m curious about the different methodologies each person uses to construct their charts. Share in the comments below!

Featured image credit: CC0 licensed photo by mdburnette from the WordPress Photo Directory.