Which is faster: baseball or glaciers?
Baseball, by its very nature, is a slow game. Unlike many sports in which speed and endurance are paramount, baseball is a game of strategy and guesswork based on percentages, requiring deliberation. But if Major League Baseball wants to keep backsides in its bleachers, it better act again to speed up games.
A routine nine-inning game tests the patience of even the purest of baseball fans when it stretches longer than three hours, and the average MLB game is running just over that mark this year.
The Pirates-Phillies game in Pittsburgh Sunday, which the Pirates won by a 5-4 score, ran three hours and eight minutes. Parents of small children in the stands must have breathed a collective sigh of relief that the game did not go into extra innings. Tuesday night’s game – a 7-4 loss to the Seattle Mariners – clocked in at exactly the same time.
Coincidentally, three hours and eight minutes was the average length of an MLB game until rules were enacted in 2015 to shorten the length of games. Those rules included reducing the time between innings and speeding up the review process, and they succeeded in cutting average game length by 12 minutes.
Keep in mind that the fabled seventh game of the 1960 World Series, where Bill Mazeroski hit a walk-off home run over the left field wall to defeat the New York Yankees by a score of 10-9, took two hours and 36 minutes to unfold.
Nick Schwartz of Fox Sports noted that this meant that baseball games were still more than 20 minutes longer than National Hockey League games and more than 40 minutes longer than the average National Basketball League game.
Even with the rules in place, games have gotten longer this year by about four minutes. That may not sound like much, but Schwartz notes that with 2,430 MLB games, it adds up to an additional 6.83 days of baseball.
What’s causing baseball to become longball? One factor is the video-review process. It seems every close play at first or second base and nearly every ball hit close to the foul line comes under review. In days of old (not that long ago) the umpires made the call and the call stood. Now, their calls are frequently questioned and subject to sometimes agonizingly long delay as officials in New York review the play from multiple angles.
Calls are often reversed, and justice prevails, but time drags on.
For the first century and a half of baseball, bad calls were as much a part of the game as pine tar, rosin bags and tobacco spit. Advances in video technology are depleting the authority of the umpires, particularly their ability to maintain a game’s pace.
The league is considering new rules to speed up games, including limiting the number of pitchers that can be used. Baseball purists will balk at this one, and for good reason. Deciding who should be on the mound at any given time is a big part of the sport’s strategy. There’s also talk of a 20-second pitch clock, and limiting the number of mound visits by coaches and catchers.
One option not likely to be considered is giving the home-plate umpire the authority to call balls or strikes on pitchers or batters for delay of game. It was common in the early days of baseball for the umpire to call a ball if the pitcher took too long to deliver.
It is aggravating to watch batters call for time after nearly every pitch, to strut outside the batter’s box, adjust their gloves and wipe their brows, behaving as if they were batting in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series.
If the league is serious about shortening the length of games, it will allow umpires to limit the number of times that time is requested, to keep batters in the box and pitchers pitching, and to restrict the number of times their calls are second-guessed.
Baseball will always be a slow game, but its pace should not /rival the glaciers.