Not Fast Enough!

Baseball games contain approximately 18 minutes of actual action.  The rest is made up of tossing the ball back to the pitcher, the time between innings, instant replay challenges, pitching changes, etc.  In a previous post (MLB vs Other Leagues) we noted that the average game lasted about three hours and 10 minutes.

That means that prior to this year the most recent games contained just 9.5% of actual action.  Let’s say that the pitch clocks and all the other measures shave a half hour off last year’s average game time and bring it down to two hours 40 minutes.  That would increase the action percentagewise to just over 11.2%.  Let’s go a bit more extreme and say the average game will be only 2 hours 30 minutes.  Then the percentage action rises to 12%.  Therefore, for a whopping 2.5% increase in action relative to the time we watch an entire game, we received this action gift only by allowing MLB to radically change the game by instituting the following:

• Pitch clocks
• Limits to throwing over to first base
• Limiting pitching changes
• Preventing the shift
• Automatically signaling for an intentional walk without requiring the batter to throw four balls
• Universal requirement that all teams use a designated hitter (DH)
• Placing a runner at the start of every extra inning

Now that MLB has instituted these rules the talking point of many in the media is how fast the games are played.  That seems to be the key metric now in how to measure the success and level of enjoyment of a game.  By the way, there was never any consideration that we can find to reduce the commercial time.

Will these radical rule changes lead to an increase in fandom?  Who knows at this point, but a 2.5% increase in action does not sound like a reason to ignite the inter of people who either turned away or were not previously interested in the game.  Only time will tell, but to take a chainsaw to the integrity of the game and the rules just to shave off roughly a half hour is unconscionable in our opinion.