A recent article in the WSJ mentioned that 75 years ago, a MLB game was a bit over two hours. In the mid 80’s, the typical game was two and one half hours. Today, the average has surpassed three hours. There was talk of changing the rules to shorten the game.
The article never mentioned why 21st century games take so long. Anyone know why? Baseball rules haven’t changed significantly in the past 75 years, have they?
Do the pitchers kill time between pitches? Do the players lollygag their way onto the field between innings. My hunch is that there is now a plethora of advertising which halts the game too frequently.
Here’s a recent article, in which the author compared a 1984 game to a 2014 game.
His conclusions:
Time spent on advertising (in between innings, during pitching changes) is one factor, but not the biggest factor.
The biggest factor is time spent between pitches – the pitcher taking longer, batters stepping out of the batter’s box to adjust.
This USA Today article, from a few years ago, reaches the same conclusions, though it also point to mid-inning pitching changes becoming more common.
I do think that the biggest issue is the between-pitches fiddling around. When I was growing up, and first seriously watching baseball in the late 1970s, the Indians’ Mike Hargrove was nicknamed “The Human Rain Delay,” because of how long his at-bats would take – he’d step out of the batter’s box between every pitch to adjust his gloves, adjust his helmet, etc. Today, it feels like nearly every hitter’s at-bats are like Hargrove’s.
(Also, flagging this thread for a move to The Game Room.)
I’ve seen a score of AAA games since they instituted the pitch clock in AA and AAA giving the pitcher 20 seconds for each pitch. It seems to have the desired effect as most pitches are delivered with about 5 seconds left on the clock. I’ve only once seen a pitcher take more than 20 seconds and be penalized a ball.
I suspect they won’t even need to add the clock the MLB games because all the pitchers coming up through the minors now are work faster as a matter of habit.
Af ew years ago Bill James commented that if Mike Hargrove played today, he never would have gotten a nickname because no one would have noticed he took a long time. Hargrove’s fiddling around was unusual in the 1970s but is just normal today.
Batters delaying things is absolutely the worst problem with game length. There’s not a doubt in my mind. Watch the broadcast of a World Series game from the 70s - you can find any number of them on Youtube - right after watching a modern game - and you will see what I mean. It’s a couple of seconds here and there but it adds up, and it affects the perception of how fast things move. I tried watching Game 6 of the 1978 World Series, while watching the Jays-A’s game on right now, and the batters absolutely are slower now overall.
It’s also not at all hard to understand why people hit more home runs now, by the way, just watching some guys swing in 1978.
ETA: Man, I dunno what Kendrys Morales has been eating for breakfast the last two days but his teammates should eat it too. Yesterday he hit the game winning homer in the bottom of the ninth, and just now he hit the game tying homer in the bottom of the ninth.
I would put the length of the games mostly on the batters adjusting and the pitchers taking longer to pitch. If an average game has somewhere around 300 pitches total, even if each pitch took an added 5 seconds, that would be 25 extra minutes a game. Ugh.
I’m a big proponent of the Pitch Clock. The pitcher has a certain time to deliver the next pitch at the conclusion of the prior play, or it’s an automatic ball. The batter has a certain time to get ready or it’s an automatic strike. Argue all you like about what the times should be, just make them get their shit together and play.
Recent studies have shown that batters hit better if they have more time between pitches. Seems to be either:
batters are psychologically influenced to expect something of the next pitch based on the last one, or
pitchers can pitch better when they can stay in their rhythm,
or both.
But based on this, many batting coaches tell batters to try to take at least X seconds between pitches. With many doing this, games get longer. Rules could be changed to affect this, but that would give an additional advantage to pitchers. (Baseball rules are already heavily weighted to favor pitchers over batters.)
I’d advocate not letting batters adjust. They should have things fitted before they get to the plate, and I’m convinced that if you’re adjusting your gloves for the fifth time during your time at the plate it’s either a nervous habit, superstition, or you’re stalling. None of which seems necessary.
Pitchers should in turn have a clock like basketball and football. Throwing a pitch or throwing to a baseman to try to catch a runner would end the clock, and the clock starts again when the pitcher receives the ball again.
I’m only a casual baseball fan because the pace is atrocious. It gets so slow that the commentators frequently struggle to come up with something to fill the time and often veer from talking about the game, to talking about baseball in general, to talking about anything at all.
Most pitchers would not be affected by a clock; it’s the batters that would be affected. Pitchers generally like to work in a rhythm, and absent some serious disagreement in a tough situation over pitch selection, simply look in, get the sign, and deliver.
I’ve noticed that a lot of batters seem to re-adjust their batting gloves between each pitch. If someone would invent a glove that stays put for more than two seconds, that might add up to significant time savings.
Somewhere (pretty sure on fivethirtyeight.com) I read that pitchers pitch better (ETA: they pitch harder, IIRC) if they take longer between pitches. They tried to get confirmation about this from the teams, but no one would talk to them about it. Apparently, many teams (if not all of them) analysed pitching (Sabermetrics comes in handy) and came to this conclusion, but didn’t want to reveal the secret to the opposition. But they taught their pitchers to slow down their rhythm.
Makes sense. Both pitching & swinging are near-max-effort moves. No matter how good an athlete one is, making one’s own personal max effort move over and over on 2 seconds’ rest, 10 seconds’ rest, or 30 seconds’ rest will have very different outcomes.
Especially with players now thinking much more of their total multi-year career than of today’s game, there’s a strong interest to A) maximize personal longevity within MLB, and B) maximize personal statistics. Playing slower and thereby getting a better ERA or OBP as well as squeezing a couple more years out of your body while earning serious loot sounds like a very powerful and 100% legitimate motivator.
Baseball players have been making pretty serious loot for awhile now. I know it’s astronomically higher than it was 30 years ago, but 30 years ago you could still make a gigantic amount of money and players were famously interested in their stats and career length. Getting to - and remaining in - the big leagues was, in any practical sense, just as big a motivator in 1979 as it is today. Sure, a mid range starter might be getting $400,000 a year instead of $7 million, but $400,000 a year in 1979, with the additional benefits of being treated like a king, doing every young boy’s dream job and building pension time was a significant motivator. So why would a totally different generation of players behave in a career-enhancing manner now, but not then, even though the rewards then were still quite significant?
