Opening Day and Shorter Games

The media is falling over itself and raving about shorter games and how they are going to transform the baseball experience after introducing pitch clocks for the first time on this opening day.  What though is actually causing a reduction in attendance levels and is that attributable to the length of the games? Were radical rule changes along with pitch clocks necessary to shift the tide of lower attendance?

Let’s take a look at attendance figures since 1999 as noted in Baseball Reference, Baseball Reference.com

MLB Total Attendance and Average Time by Year

MLB attendance was trending up from 1999 until 2007 with a brief downturn in 2002 and 2003.  There was a peak of attendance in 2007 and it then dropped off but stayed steady around 73M from 2009 through 2017. Then attendance dropped even further beginning in 2018 to today’s level which was 64.5M in 2022. Let’s first look at the time of the games.  There really is not a correlation between the time of the game and attendance levels.  Yes, there was a slight tick up in the average time but nothing outlandish, which was an extra 15 minutes from 2004 until 2017.  Could that really be the major reason causing attendance to decline in recent years?  If one were to buy into this reasoning you would have to ignore the other factors that could have reduced attendance in recent years include things like:

• The smaller capacity of newer ballparks
• Coronavirus in the past few years
• The overall cost to attend a game
• The rise of other competition (i.e. other sports, internet, e-sports, etc.)
• Changing tastes

Of course it could be a combination of factors, but MLB has chosen to focus in on shortening games as the cure all to a sport that might not be truly ailing, and therefore does not require radical rule changes.