November 1, 2021

Oh Great, Another Cranky Column About Baseball Games Taking Too Long

WALL ST JOURNAL

 Finally, some good news: Reading this lousy sports column will take 3 hours and 57 or so minutes less time than Sunday’s Game 5 of the World Series.

That game lasted the routine nine innings. And took a whopping four hours. 

Now granted, this column is probably about 1/200th as interesting as watching the Astros and Braves play nine. 

Still, the point remains:

Baseball’s gotta speed it up. 

Hardcore baseball people don’t like it when casual drop-in doofuses like me lament how long the sport takes today. They have been hearing a version of this complaint for decades now, and they are sick of it. 

Baseball’s just fine—sit on a rock, you short-attention-span bozos!

World Series games are consequential chess matches with historic implications. If you can’t savor the strategy, your loss, simpleton! 

Don’t your fancy Tour de France stages take, like 16 hours? 

All fair points, honestly. On the final one, I would argue that at least Tour de France bicyclists are pedaling somewhere—from wine country to cheese country, up and over mountains, collecting hundreds of miles, stopping to take nature breaks, and passing many, many sheep, and many, many cows.

Baseball’s in a confined area! They have no mountains! They have actual lavatories! There are no sheep! There are no cows!

Do you know the slowpoke NFL started and finished an entire Sunday night football contest—Dallas defeated Minnesota—before baseball wrapped it up? Jerry Jones was probably in the JerryJet halfway back to Dallas before the final out in Atlanta. 

Did you know Fox announcers Joe Buck and John Smoltz began Game 5 clean shaven and had full speakeasy bartender beards by the end of game? Do you know A-Rod celebrated two birthdays, and bought and sold and re-bought the T-Wolves?

(None of that above paragraph is true, but I feel like it could be.)

If it sounds like I’ve lost it, that I’m blowing a gasket…I just want to be baseball’s buddy. It feels that the deposed National Pastime repeats this madness again and again, and it’s hard to think it isn’t contributing to the sport’s declining mindshare. 

How do you build an audience when you ask it to stay up so late?

The answer is, you don’t. My elementary school-aged children—potential MLB customers—were jacked up on 10 pounds of Halloween Skittles and Sour Patch Kids and still couldn’t make it to the third inning. Candidly, I was right behind them: I was in deep REM by the eighth. 

Someone might say: Look, pal, Game 5 was high scoring. The Astros won 9-5, narrowing Atlanta’s lead to 3 games to 2 and pushing the series back to Houston. The Astros used six pitchers. The Braves, five. It was a long one. It happens. 

Except Game 4 finished 3-2 Braves, and still took 3:45. Game 1 ended 6-2 Braves, and went 4:06. Game 3 went just 3 hours, 24 minutes, but involved the yanking of a guy throwing a no-hitter and set a bizarre record for inertia. Here’s Tom Verducci in Sports Illustrated: 

This was the 47th regulation World Series game in which only one or two runs scored. It took the longest time (3:24) among all those without a bottom of the ninth.

Yowza. (Still, in baseball terms, 3 hours, 24 minutes is a Ramones song. I’ll take it.) 

The culprit here, largely, is all the pitching changes, abetted by a significant strategic shift: starting pitching, as we knew it, is increasingly kaput. 

The days of handing grizzled Jack Morris the rock for the 10th are over. Games are pitched by committee, because the numbers say it’s the most ruthlessly effective way to win: cycling through a torrent of flamethrowers who know they need to pitch for only an inning or two. To keep a hurler in is to make an opponent comfortable, and chance disaster. That’s why you get Atlanta’s Ian Anderson pulled while carrying five innings of no-hit ball.

How does this turn around? Even with baseball wisely tweaking its rules—relief pitchers now have to face a minimum of three hitters—the action still drags. Baseball’s nine-inning average went up to 3 hours, 10 minutes, 7 seconds, this season, an all-time record. 

There’s a longer, fascinating existential conversation here, about baseball’s focus on analytics and efficiency and what it’s done to the game—how pitching by committee and the defensive shifts and the all-or-nothing “launch angle” approach at the plate have conspired to make a game that is smarter and statistically defensible, but aesthetically grim.

This started as a “pace of play” problem, but it’s morphed into a product problem. 

And while it’s easy to dismiss the moaning about long games as the same old anti-baseball cranks yelling at clouds, a wise business would see an opportunity. This Series is a huge moment for Braves fans and Astros fans, but a wider audience is always going to be good for the brand. 

I’m not a hater. I say this as someone who loves a World Series. I think it can be an incredibly dramatic and compelling television product—the way games are produced with all the macro and micro camera angles, zipping from the players in the field to close-ups of panicked fans in the stands to managers looking tense—is magical theater. 

It just shouldn’t take longer than getting a Ph.D. 

A baseball fan should be able to make it all the way to the end. Like you just did here. Congratulations! Let’s play two.