Over the last several seasons, I’ve watched as the minor leagues have become a realm of experimentation for the big leagues. We’ve gone through the throw-over rule (no more than two pickoff attempts per batter), the larger base rule (to encourage more stolen base attempts) and the pitch clock in the last few seasons. Corollary to the pitch clock is a between-innings clock, and while it’s the latter I’m looking to address here, the overall idea of speeding games up involves the former three as well.
In general, a game which is better pitched and low-scoring should take less time than an 11-10 slugfest. Yet even when the MLB aggregate batting average is at its lowest point since 1968 (considered “the year of the pitcher,” before the mound was lowered and the designated hitter was introduced) the games are still taking significantly longer. I looked at a sampling of 1968 games (Saturdays in September, when games should theoretically take longer with expanded rosters) to see how long baseball took back then.
Out of the 40 game sample I ended up with, there were only four games that exceeded three hours: two of them were 10-inning games, one was a nationally televised Game of the Week that happened to be Denny McLain’s historic 30th victory, and one was a game featuring 20 hits and 10 walks. There were also three games lasting under two hours: a 10-0 second game of a doubleheader, a 6-inning rain-shortened game, and a classic 2-1 pitchers’ duel. On average, the games lasted about 2 hours and 25 minutes. So, given that we have roughly the same offense expressed in terms of batting average, why are the games taking so long? Even when I go to a ballgame here at Perdue Stadium, where games begin at 7:05 p.m. on a weeknight or Saturday, I’m often leaving after 10:00. (Not that I really mind that much.) But that’s even with the various timer clocks, the larger bases, and the throwover rule.
I wasn’t around to watch the between-innings routine of the old days, but I suspect they didn’t take as long as they do now. I’m sure it was once that one team ran off the field, the other team ran on, the pitcher took a few warm-up tosses and that was about it. That’s how it was when I played from Little League up into high school, so there’s not much reason to believe the bigs were all that different except they had organ music. Now we wait for the between-innings promotion to finish (which, in truth is only a minute or two) or, at the major league level, the commercials to wrap up. Even so, things went more quickly way back when: for example, the 1976 Monday Night Baseball game that signaled the coming-out party for national sensation Mark “the Bird” Fidrych only took 1:51 to play, meaning ABC (even with the between-inning spots) had plenty of time to fill before their affiliates’ 11:00 news. That’s unheard of these days, as World Series games where coverage begins at 8:00 here in the East often drag close to or even past midnight.
While the powers-that-be who run baseball as a sport obsess over time, though, I think a good portion of the reason games take longer is the technology put in place to assist players in being better at their craft and assessing the opponents. Pitchers are learning to better harness their stuff and exploiting batter weaknesses for the couple times through the order a starting pitcher will go before the parade of relievers takes over. (That was tempered a bit by the three-batter rule. A reliever given a “clean” inning doesn’t make much difference in time when compared to a holdover, but those mid-inning pitching changes are a drag.) Granted, eliminating overshifts that extend to the point of having three infielders on one side of second base will make some improvement in average, but I don’t think it’s going to make it that much easier for pitchers.
When batters are taught to swing for the fences with a more pronounced uppercut in an effort to increase launch angle - as opposed to the method I was taught of seeking to hit solid line drives - they’re too often coming up with nothing but air. There is a term called “true outcomes” where fielders have nothing to do with the result of an at-bat: a strikeout, a walk, or a home run. That’s what baseball is trending toward and frankly it’s boring to watch. I like “immaculate innings” but they shouldn’t be almost a dime a dozen as they’ve become. Prior to 1990 there were only 29 immaculate innings* pitched in MLB history, but now we are up to 110, with 7 in 2022 alone.
Baseball is trying to have it both ways: they want more run-scoring offense in quicker games. (Chicks dig the home run and all that rubbish.) But what they should strive for is more exciting games where people don’t notice that two hours have passed because they’re riveted to the action. Maybe what we need is what the Orioles did last year: moving their most vulnerable fence back to make home runs more difficult to hit. The batters will complain, but a ball off the wall will still clear some bases.
It’s one thing I like about the level of baseball I mainly watch from my season ticketed perch: because players aren’t quite polished and mature, home runs aren’t cheap. It teaches the value of advancing runners and getting them in from third with less than two outs. Once upon a time I recall I heard Joe Garagiola complaining on a Game of the Week that “bunting is a lost art.” It seems to me that choking up with two strikes and trying for contact has gone that way as well. Putting the ball in play has a lot of exciting outcomes, too.
I know the “moneyball” analysts may show me the numbers are better in swinging for a home run because it takes three or four singles to string together a run as opposed to just one hit, but at least that station-to-station sort of game is watchable. It would be more of a return to a 1970s mentality, an era where speed and defense was the prized method of building a champion rather than waiting for the three-run homer. Those games moved along at a quicker pace and weren’t plodding three-hour snoozefests where half the crowd is watching their phones because there’s little action on the field.
I became a baseball fan because I played it, but I learned a lot from how the pros played on my TV. (Even if my Tigers were having some down years at the time.) Watching the guys chase balls around the lot was interesting to me in a way that the game isn’t now. These days it’s more like soccer, where you have a bunch of mindless action punctuated on rare occasions by a successful shot on goal. Thank goodness we didn’t have fences to swing at in our Little League, so any hit - even an infield dribbler - became a potential run scorer unless defensed properly.
These measures MLB is taking to speed the game up won’t do a thing. Once we get a couple guys who chase .400 again and threaten triple-digit steals, maybe the game will get back to what makes it exciting.
*An immaculate inning is 9 pitches, 9 consecutive strikes, and three strikeouts. Foul balls are counted for strike one and strike two but strike three has to be a called strike, swinging strike, or caught foul tip. It’s perhaps the pinnacle of positive true outcomes from a pitcher’s standpoint.