The pitch clock is undoubtedly the most impactful of the changes made recently to speed up the game. However, other changes were implemented alongside it that have contributed in meaningful ways:
- Limit on the number of times per plate appearance a pitcher can "disengage" by stepping off/calling time or making a pickoff move.
- Limit on the number of times per plate appearance a batter can "disengage" by stepping out/calling time.
- Minimum of 3 batters must be faced by an incoming relief pitcher (or must finish the half-inning)
- Limit on the number of mound visits per game
- Larger bases
- Elimination (mostly) of the defensive "shift"
- Team at bat starts with an automatic "ghost" runner on 2nd base in extra innings
While I also dislike the ghost runner, I can't deny that it's been a net positive for the game. By mostly eliminating marathon extra-inning slogs, not only does it speed up the game, but it also makes it much harder for teams to run out of pitchers they can safely use, which reduces injuries and ensures that we are not subjected to watching two backup catchers throw 48mph Eephus pitches in the 17th inning, long after they stopped selling beer.
Long extra inning games are pretty rare. I too hate the “Manfred Man” but the players and coaches overwhelmingly approve of it. I think that using the ghost runner at the start of the 12th inning would be a good compromise.
Reminding me of the Mariners playoffs game a couple seasons ago that lasted 18 innings. That was bizarre to watch. I forget who they were facing. Astros I think?
I'm in favor of compromise, but why the 12th inning? Haven't looked at the data but from memory it does kind of feel like games that get to the 12th inning tend to last into, say, the 15th or later.
I think 12th based on (and I cannot emphasize this enough) vibes instead of data would be fine.
10th definitely feels too soon (it's basically the 9th), and the 11th still kinda feels too soon too.
If anything, I'd argue it should be fine to ask your closer/reliever to pitch an extra inning (the 10th) "as-is". The 11th makes you burn an extra reliever, and that should be okay.
The 12th is where I'd start to say "okay, wind it down, we're all losing now".
I see it as a negative. Too many games are lost because a reliever gives up a couple fly ball outs and the Manfred Man comes round to score. I’d rather see ties than these fake wins.
Ties are allowed, but only in very special circumstances. If for some reason they can’t keep playing, the game is supposed to be suspended and then restarted at a later date. But if it’s the last time the two teams play each other in the season and the playoff tiebreaker rules aren’t an issue, they just end the game in a tie. It doesn’t show up in the standings, so you probably didn’t even realize it happens! The player stats count, however.
The last tie in baseball was in 2016 - Cubs vs Pirates. The game ended in the 6th inning due to rain.
If you look at the article, you can see that games have been getting progressively slower since records started being kept back in the 1920s. The recent rule changes have managed to cut the duration back to what they were in the early 80s.
By your logic, the games my mom grew up watching weren't slow enough, and the games my grandma watched were true blasphemy at around 2 hours flat.
Meanwhile, from my wife's perspective, I spend all afternoon watching even these sped-up games.
Does watching or listening to baseball feel too fast-paced? I haven't played much attention to baseball in many years, but I agree with you, baseball is supposed to be slow.
The ghost runner rule is by far the most ridiculous. A pitcher can give up no hits, and get an ER and the L in extra innings. Make it make sense. Baseball is also telling on itself here because that rule does not apply in the playoffs.
I hate the removal of the shift. I thought it was such an interesting innovation to the game, and the fact that baseball allowed for such things part of its magic.
I'm with you. I think it should only apply to games that have fairly clearly gotten "stuck" and things are just dragging - like others have suggested, 12th inning seems like a reasonable start.
I've always felt a lot of intensity going into the 9th inning in any sort of lose came, even moreso if it's tied. And before the manfred man, that carried through if we went to the 10th or 11th.
Now it feels like as soon as we get to extra innings it's a shitshow. It's one thing if a pitcher has made a series of mistakes (or the fielders behind him) and you end up with someone on second and you throw a passed ball and someone scores. It's another when the first pitch of the half inning is a passed ball and this bizarro zombie runner scores on you.
I want to watch teams have to put together a string of "good baseball" moments to win, or at the very least watch a trainwreck in action if one team loses the game more than the other team won it. Or the majesty of a well-hit long ball, ideally with an excellent bat flip. The only thing that should be able to walk off the game in the very first at-bat of the bottom half of the inning is a home run.
Baseball games are way too long even before they get to extra innings. The two hour limit is the most important rule change that makes bananaball superior (but their other changes are also universally positive).
Pandering to the few diehards who can pay attention to more than 100 games a year on every day of the week including weekdays for 4+ hours at a time is not a sustainable way to build or maintain interest in your sport in newer generations.
The people who watch baseball and care about baseball don't like the Manfred runner. The people who complain that "baseball games are way too long even before they get to extra innings" aren't people who watch baseball and care about baseball. I don't care about the options baseball haters have about baseball rules.
The unlimited pickoffs were ridiculous. It technically meant the game could simply not progress until either the pitcher or the runner made a mistake. Glad it's no longer the case.
To be pedantic I don’t think the 3-batter rule mentions relief pitchers. If a team wanted to use an opening pitcher to face only the first batter and then replace him, that would also be against the rules.
The wildest thing about this chart is that it shows that from the 1920s to the 1940s you could conceivably watch a baseball game:
- that took less than 2 hours
- was in the afternoon
One baseball writer theorized that part of the decline in interest in baseball amongst kids is b/c they moved to night games so kids couldn't watch anymore (bed time etc etc).
e.g. many older people speak fondly of getting home from school and listening / watching a baseball game of their home team.
1. baseball competes in a sea of media and multimedia options and its competition has been growing ever since TV moved into the cable-era. Now it also has to compete with internet, games, social media, etc. Theres only so much time and attention for people to focus on it.
2. Long season. I love baseball but you can go 2-3 weeks not watching a game and have missed nothing.
3. Cost to go to games plus location of stadiums in car-centric areas often means painful commutes to the games for most Americans and then bringing two kids is like making it a $400 affair between parking, food, souvenirs etc. That's expensive for a lot of people.
The exit of people from the cities into the burbs in the mid-20th did a lot of damage to the idea of going to a game.
Meanwhile, we saw the Savannah Bananas tonight. I wonder if their brand of baseball will find appeal more broadly? It’s more spectacle than sport but it’s the most enthusiastic I’ve seen a crowd for anything other than football.
Agreed, this is pretty huge. I think at one point in my early teen years (I think 2008? My recollection was that it was a year the Phillies were in it, although that could have been 2009) there was a game in the World Series that got postponed and had to be restarted the next night, and because it already was a few innings in, the remainder the next night started maybe at 8 and ended at 10, which was much nicer given that I always struggled with the early morning starts for school.
The other major thing I think affected it is that in most of the markets where baseball is most popular, ticket prices skyrocketed over the past few decades, and a lot of the more popular teams would sell out for almost every game pretty early on in the year. Growing up in the Boston area, it was pretty noticeable how much more of a hassle it became for my dad to take my brothers and I to Red Sox games in the early 2000s[1]. In my earliest years, I remember my father taking us each to one game individually each season as well as usually a couple with all of us there, but it got to the point where eventually he'd just buy all of us tickets for one game because getting tickets to 5-6 separate games just wasn't worth the money. He and I started going to a lot of minor league games in my high school years just because we enjoyed getting to see baseball in person enough, but my brothers generally weren't as interested in taking an hour or two to ride to New Hampshire to see the Fishercats or something similar. I have to imagine that this phenomenon made it a lot harder to get kids interested in baseball for my generation.
[1] Yes, this also happened to coincide with the years that the Red Sox started doing really well, but that wasn't necessarily the cause. Their streak of sell-outs that lasted close to a decade iirc started earlier than the 2004 season, and the prices were not nearly as high (even after adjusting for inflation) in previous times they had made it to the World Series. My dad had told stories about going to see large numbers of games despite being a mostly in debt grad student in the mid eighties, including the year they won the penant in 1986. Baseball just wasn't as expensive to see in person until relatively recently.
The speed of games in those days was influenced by very little reliance on relievers (it's why Cy Young is the leader in wins AND losses, though even in recent history, Nolan Ryan had more complete games in some years that many pitchers today have in their ENTIRE careers). The need for breaks between innings, switching pitchers, etc to fit with TV commercial breaks is also an influence.
Until recently I had only ever been to one baseball game.. saw the Jays when I was 10. I remember falling asleep at the game because it was so slow and boring, and never really watched baseball after that.
But in the last couple years I’ve seen the Mets and Phillies multiple times, and it’s now one of my favourite sports to watch thanks to the pitch clock increasing the pace of the game. I’d be really curious to see data on how many new fans the league got after the change.
COVID did such a number on attendance that it's hard to separate anything else out. It has been increasing since it bottomed out but is still below the peak.
The best I can say: it was falling before the pandemic and it's now above where it was even before everything shut down. So... maybe?
> I remember falling asleep at the game because it was so slow and boring, and never really watched baseball after that.
If you listen to people talking about how they loved going to the game with their family, it's usually about what they did to pass the time during the boredom. It was America's pastime, because you needed to figure out how to pass time during the boredom.
The pitch clock is nice though, gives a rythym to action.
That said, minor league baseball is a lot more fun to watch because there's a lot more variance, and they have a lot of stuff going on between the innings to keep you awake ;)
This is why the Savannah Bananas (and the banana league) are so popular. Banana-ball draws sellout crowds wherever they play. The main focus is "don't be boring."
The graph shoes interquartile range, so this wouldn't be a factor, but worth noting: baseball also changed its rules on extra inning games in the past few years which speeds things up. A runner starts on second base which reduces the 0-run extra innings that are responsible for the 19 inning game I remember as a kid. [0]
A summer afternoon, static on the radio, the low hum of an announcer calling balls and strikes like he’s reading scripture in a Midwest church. Baseball used to be stitched together with silence. You heard the game as much in the pauses as in the plays.
Then the voice came in. Once the game hit the airwaves, it slowed. Had to. The ball waited for the broadcast.
Out of the dead-ball fog came the home run. No more bunting, no more clever thefts of second. Now it was swing, admire, trot. Alongside the homers came the walks and the strikeouts. Fewer balls in play. More staring, less running. Time thickened, and the nature of the game was trending towards longer games.
World War II shaved minutes from the clock. With so many players overseas, the talent pool shrank. The games got shorter because they became simpler. When the talent came back, the games got longer, largely because, after 1947, the game was flooded with previously segregated talent and players who were returning from overseas.
In the 60s, pitchers took over. Dominance from the mound. ERAs dropped. Batting averages plummeted. In 1968 they called it the Year of the Pitcher, then called the rulebook to fix it. Scoring came back, and with it, longer games.
Television followed with commercial breaks and camera angles. The game had to pause for sponsors. The seventh-inning stretch now came with a soft drink.
In the 70s, the bullpen became a revolving door. Specialists. Situational matchups. Every pitching change added minutes. Coaches walked the mound like they were heading to confession.
And the game kept expanding. OPS rose. More runners meant more pitches. More strikeouts meant more throws. Every batter became a saga.
If you look at the graph, you can see a trend that matches well with changes in baseball. We could probably break down every high and low to describe the shift based on rules, personal changes, etc.
Then came the pitch clock. No more dawdling. No more meditative pacing between pitches. And now a reliever has to face at least three batters in an inning. No more one-pitch exits.
It’s not that baseball got lazy. It got layered, commercialized, optimized, and strategized, but it forgot about time management.
The graph shows an outline, with the trends representing a chapter in baseball history, which is very cool.
> It’s not that baseball got lazy. It got layered, commercialized, optimized, and strategized, but it forgot about time management.
This is why I can't stand modern basketball. Deliberate fouling in the last quarter is optimal and strategic as far as winning. I'm sure those extra commercial slots are enticing to the networks as well. But it's boring as hell when the last 5 minutes stretch out to an hour, and the final result now boils down to a lucky draw instead of skill. Any sense of fun has been lost.
You’re a wonderful writer. It made me curious enough to look at your previous comments. (Your comment about your grandma who baked was also like a wonderful short story but in fewer words.) Do you write books as well, by chance? Or a blog, or anything like that? Sorry to anyone if this seems weird. A simple upvote didn’t seem enough.
For a while, I was inflicting baseball history on the unsuspecting readers of Pitcher List[1], until the twin boulders of professional and personal life demanded I focus on pushing them.
One persistent frustration is that my writing voice never quite captured how I meant to express myself. So, this past year, I've been working (sometimes stubbornly) to close that gap, assuming I take the time to think and edit. Your kind words mean a lot.
Most days, pray for a recent sabbatical, I try to post a daily baseball history note[2]. I hope to resume this ritual after this weekend, assuming the stars (and schedules) stay in proper hyperdrive alignment and maintain the boulder automation.
As the chaos of my life dwindles, a blog, or book (or both) remains a possibility.
Assuming approximately 0 commercials in 1920 with a runtime of 110 minutes -> 140 minutes. I'm trying to decide if there's 30 minutes of commercials, or not? I'm thinking about the standard sitcom (TV) commercial density which is a 23-24m show with 6-7m of commercials (25–33%). So... 30m seems in range?
I wouldn't say they're "so much longer" now (since the pitch clock was implemented, that is). This year, 9 inning games averaged 2:38. In 1960, they ran 2:33. There are lots of factors that contribute to longer gametime. A couple that correlate with the general trend for longer:
Commercial breaks are currently limited to 2 minutes by rule, and it takes some time just to run on and off the field, so I am dubious of the impact of that. (Though the rule has changed, and I forget whether there were an additional 20 minutes because of that back in the 1990s/2000s.)
That said, unless it were a stellar pitching duel, I'd really despise constant sub-2 hour games.
Yes, the pitch clock and the relievers' requirement to face at least three batters in an inning have done a very good job of handling game times.
At some point, as the game continues to evolve, I think we'll see an upward swing in game times in the future, but I don't believe it will trend as high as it has before. I think that sub-three-hour games will remain the sweet spot going forward.
Now, for sub-two-hour games, this is one I wish I could watch and re-watch
In the middle of a pennant race, Addie Joss pitched a 74-pitch perfect game against Ed Walsh, who had already won 39 games that year. The game kept Cleveland in the running for the pennant. Game time? 1:40 minutes. The minimum number of batters for a nine-inning game is 54, this game had 56.
Wouldn’t the minimum be 51? 932 =54, but if the team batting second is winning after the top of the 9th then they don’t need to play the bottom of the ninth, so subtract 3? Not a baseball person.
And if you have rain , they can call the game "complete" if the losing team had 5 half innings at bat. So that could be 28. Assume 27 outs and one home run by the home team.
The time between half-innings increases, so the radio and TV could play commercials on the broadcast. Pitching changes are longer, etc. You don't see it much at the game, but if you are one of the folks who used to listen to the game on the radio, at the game itself, you get a feel for how the flow of the game is affected by the broadcasts.
I haven't paid enough attention at baseball games. At hockey games, if you can see the scorekeeper, they have a lamp at the glass that will come on during a stopage to let the refs know it's time for a commercial (if you watch for this, you can get a jump on the crowd if you need a bathroom break or refreshments). You can usually predict a commercial timeout, they've got guidelines that are pretty consistently applied [1]
I meant to also say that the light doesn't go off until the commercial break is done, so they don't drop the puck before the broadcasters are ready. Typically an off-ice official holds a door open and stands in it to also signal not to start, if it looks like everyone is ready to go a bit early.
Not during batting. For pitching changes they do and pitching changes are more frequent now that starters “only” pitch 100 pitches or less. Time between innings seems to have a higher ad load though it’s inconsistent from what I can tell depending perhaps on the market.
The game has changed dramatically since the 1970s. My favourite example is from 1979.
In 1979, Phil Niekro lead the major leagues with 342 innings pitched. In 2025, Logan Webb lead the majors with 207 innings pitched.
Modern pitchers throw about 2/3 the pitches that pre-80s pitchers threw. Part of this is player safety - baseball destroyed some amazing arms. And part of it is the fact that relievers today tend to throw 98+.
Sorta related: I feel instant replay challenges have sucked the life out of the game. Arguing with the ump over bad calls has never accomplished anything, but it's entertaining, it gets the blood flowing; it always made me feel more connected to the game and other fans. Now, managers just request an instant replay challenge, we wait a few minutes, and that's it - accurate, but boring.
For example, I watched around 100 games this season, but I can't recall a single instant replay challenge. However, ask anyone from St. Louis about "game 6" (typically, that's all you need to say!), and they'll get fired up, ranting about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyt1xEvqqow . Forty years later, people still remember that blown call like it was yesterday.
I'm fairly confident you're in the minority of serious fans on this one. Anecdotal, but I don't personally know a single big baseball fan that wants to go back to no instant replay.
Which doesn't mean they're necessarily happy with where instant replay is - particularly since New York relies on their own specific camera feeds, and sometimes don't have the same angles available as those watching on TV do. It's resulted in some fairly rage inducing incidents where we can clearly see the call was majorly blown from home, but the replay room can't overturn it from the angles they have. Every official camera feed should be available for them to use, imo.
What is shorter games doing for attendance, concession sales, ad sales on the TV broadcast? Seems like you want people stuck in the park for as long as possible (well, at least until they make them stop selling alcohol) but if that's too long, people simply won't go. Meanwhile, I have no idea whether longer or shorter games are better for TV. I would guess shorter is better? After an hour of the same insurance commercial over and over, you're either going to switch insurance companies or you're not. Seeing the ad 3 more times probably isn't worth very much.
You might be surprised. During the peak game length seasons, people would start trickling out around like the 5th or 6th inning, and by the 8th or 9th, the stadium could get surprisingly sparse even if it started full. My dad and my brothers and I used to have a habit of moving down from our bleachers seats after the seventh inning because there would be enough empty seats that we could often move into ones within the first few rows behind one of the dugouts to get a closer view of the last couple innings (and maybe increase our chances of getting a foul ball if we were lucky, which we generally weren't!). This got especially common when they tried to curb people driving home drunk by ending beer sales after the seventh inning, at which point instead of sticking around to sober up, quite a lot of people just opted to leave once they couldn't buy any more beer.
Where I am, the people I know are spending a lot less on concessions & alcohol. Not because of the shorter game but because the beer prices have become astronomical and the food quality has become terrible.
So instead we pregame nearby, maybe have a beer, and then go out afterwards.
I went to a Metallica concert at a large basketball stadium this summer. The concession stands were charging $22 for a beer. I can get that same can of beer at my grocery store for $1.25.
That's one of the reasons inflation doesn't scare me as much as it does other people. When it gets out of hand I always find easy ways to adjust some unnecessary spending. I'm eating healthier since I decided to spend less money on food by cooking.
Groceries are also impacted by inflation - plenty of people scared by not being able to meet even basic alimentary needs due to increasing costs. Google a bit for “poverty meals”.
Sure, but it was low-hanging fruit for me to cook for $4/meal rather than eat out for $15/meal. Maybe I'd have been able to cook for $3/meal if I'd started a year earlier but I was still capturing a big relative efficiency.
My experience from going to giants games is that people leave when they want, not when the game is over (unless it's a nail biter). Same with arriving.
I will say, our personal experience and the comments of many fellow fans. The games seem more engaging, fun, and it's easier to be present and attentive for the whole game. That mentality and experience makes for better attendance in future games and a general attitude of "its worth the time".
Apparently less than 15-minutes of athletic action in a typical 3-hour game, with ~45-minutes devoted to advertising:
[2020] How Much American Football Is Even in an American Football Broadcast?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22218909
This explains why NFL RedZone exists.
Fun comparison, a typical Formula 1 Grand Prix clocks in at ~1.5 hours. Live race broadcasts (e.g. Sky Sports F1) will typically show the entire race with no commercial breaks or interruptions. Same goes for MotoGP (e.g. TNT Sports), where a sprint race (~10-12 laps) takes just 25 minutes, not including post race podium and interviews.
English Premier League game durations come in at just under 2-hours with a full hour of athletic action, the remaining 50% occupied by a 15-minutes halftime, substitutions, free kicks, and a mere 10-minutes of commercial interruptions.
Ever since my parents got a DVR, my dad switched to recording NFL games and then only starting to watch them until maybe an hour or so after the kickoff. He'd fast forward through the numerous commercial breaks (like before AND after each kickoff whenever someone scores? come on...) and eventually catch up near the end of the game.
Yeah, NFL games are kind of crazy. I missed a MNF game recently and saw it on YouTube the next evening (and somehow I hadn't spoiled the score for myself). It was less than 2 hours without a single play or comment edited out. Aired live, it was closer to 3:30. Literally 1/3 commercials. It's a little excessive.
If I get into a rhythm with the "advance ten-seconds" button between plays I can get down to around an hour, without missing any plays, or pre-snap action. It'd be a lot less, even, but there are times we want to see the replays, and other times I "miss" and have to jump back. It's amazing how much dead time there is in American football.
Well, speeding up the gameplay doesn't affect the number of commercial breaks. There are 18 guaranteed commercial breaks per game (two per inning). I suppose the density of ads goes up. Good deal for advertisers.
(Additional commercial breaks may happen due to mid-inning pitching changes, and I suppose it's possible that the pitch clock affects the number of pitching changes, but it's not obvious to me whether they'd become more frequent or less frequent.)
(Though separately, they did make other rules to reduce the frequency of pitching changes. But OTOH pitching changes have been gradually becoming more common for decades, with starters hardly ever completing a game anymore.)
Anytime the inning ends, or the pitcher changes, there's a 2 minute pause. Save for the mid-7th inning, when it jumps to 3 minutes. I believe they are longer during the All Star Game, and, maybe, the WS. I didn't notice them longer during the recent Wild Card.
They typically jump to commercial on every break. I watch all my games on delay, and for local broadcasts, it's 3 clicks on the skip button (1.5m) and we're back in the ball park. On national broadcasts, it's 4 clicks and we typically return with the ball in flight or the batter swinging at the first pitch. They cut it really close.
During things like mound visits, they'll slip in an interstitial ad, that's about 10s. There's also voice over ads from the announcers during short pauses (between batters, say), which is almost always team related vs a sponsor, but not as bad as on the radio. On the radio its "First pitch brought to you by...", things like that.
My nits on advertising are the shoulder patches for the players and the stencil on the mound. I particularly hate when a national broadcast layers in something over the batters eye, the locals do not do that. Last year, the Umpires were carrying sponsor patches (some crypto company), I honestly can't recall if they were wearing anything this year. The rotating banners in the back that are in park or green screens overlayed by broadcast behind the plate don't really bother me. I always find it amusing when they turn almost entirely Japanese when the Dodgers are playing.
The pitch clock and shift changes have been great, I love the game. Yankee/Red Sox series last week was a nailbiter. Being at the the local park when the Yankees are in town is a blast.
This would more than halve the amount of relief pitchers needed, so the MLBPA will never ever think about agreeing to it.
Starting pitchers averaged ~5.5 innings per game in 2024, and going 7 is hardly a rare occurrence. You would basically just have starters, 2-3 relief pitchers, one "long-man." vs. the average of 8 on the roster today.
> Games are now roughly as long as they were in the early ’80s, so the powers at MLB have cut about four decades of fat from the game. And they did it without reducing the number of commercials, because they’d never do that.
The commercialization of baseball is really ruining the game for me at times.
Company billboards and logos are in almost every square inch of empty space inside the stadiums now, making them look like giant versions of race cars with way too many tacky sponsor stickers. And just like race car drivers, these sponsor logos are creeping into the players' uniforms more and more each year, now placed prominently on one of the shoulders. If they made it into the jerseys I guess the hats are next to get ruined.
One of the worst examples are the led ad screens behind the batter, which sometimes in the tv broadcast they digitally overlay a different advertiser than what the folks in the stadium see, and it creates this messed up outline around the batter/catcher/ump that makes it look like the entire game is fake.
Then there are the tv announcers who are now required to attribute the replay on every exciting play to a different sponsor, like "this homerun replay is brought to you by Hefty! ... blah blah blah". They do it for homeruns, doubles, stolen bases, great catches, pitcher changes, even manager challenges!
But probably the most insidious practice is during an active game mid-inning, sometimes after a strikeout before the next batter gets to the plate, the tv broadcast will shrink the game down into one corner of the screen and play a regular, albeit shortened, commercial on most of the screen. No more announcer analysis about who is coming up to bat, or any other talking points relevant to the moment. Instead it's garbage commercial audio all the way up to the moment the pitcher is about to release the next pitch.
It's almost like they're trying to ruin the integrity of the sport. But I know the truth is simple corporate greed.
> But probably the most insidious practice is during an active game mid-inning, sometimes after a strikeout before the next batter gets to the plate, the tv broadcast will shrink the game down into one corner of the screen and play a regular, albeit shortened, commercial on most of the screen.
It's common for curling broadcasts to do this for lead stones (so a quarter of stones thrown). Rage-inducing.
> Company billboards and logos are in almost every square inch of empty space
This isn't new. Have you ever seen pictures of stadiums 100 years ago? I can recall people being upset a while back that the Green Monster was starting to be covered by ads. And yet one can find photos from way back when of it pretty much full of billboards.
For the record, I have managed to limit advertising for tykes to near 0. Young enough where control over electronics is viable.
As soon as a game pops up, the only unfiltered ad exposure basically, and it’s glue. The bright colors, the subconscious techniques, the hidden waveforms, whatever magic sauce they use to steal attention WORKS.
It’s like seeing a fairy tapping kids on the head and stealing all of their attention as they become droolingly attentive zombies to whatever drivel reserves the sales screen real estate for that time slice.
It is concerningly effective, and I can bet most everyone grew up saturated with it. Bordering on harassment/abuse since it can not be entirely avoided.
This is why I didn’t keep my child away from ads. Kids have extremely plastic brains and I wanted to get that neural plasticity to protect my kid for the future. The ad industry spends more money figuring kids out than the education industry - hiding ads makes ads exciting.
I view advertising as a toxin you can’t build natural immunity to vs a venom that can be acclimated to. Lead, not capsaicin.
Advertising is profitable due to subconscious connections manifesting to conscious judgements shifting. You can never be protected from this influence.
It’s still diffusing into growing neural nets, even if mind-numbing filters are being used to glancingly minimize the potential ill-effects. An analogy is a sapling oak growing on an angle for 10 years, then correcting. Sure it’s still a tree and fine, maybe even some character. The tree that grew straight, never having to avoid an obstacle is taller and sturdier against the elements, less likely to get eaten by short animals. The brain is plastic, but it does solidify as you age.
This makes sense. Growing up I had a friend whose parents didn’t let him watch tv. Whenever he came over to play he would stare almost drooling at the tv (or if it wasn’t on, begging to turn it on) while the rest of us who were allowed to watch tv played and were easily able to ignore it.
It almost allows people to create their own real estate and rent it out at growing prices as the crowds increase. And when they max out at what one would pay for one piece of that real estate, they just rent off other pieces of real estate (more ads)
The best concert I ever saw was one I only knew about from a TV commercial.
And I realized after become aggressive about skipping all commercials that I'm no longer seeing movies other than the most mainstream franchise ones that it's impossible not to learn about. I used to come across trailers for movies and now I never do.
As with all things, the far extremist take (advertising is a cancer) is misguided.
Advertising is information. We're smart adults and can separate the facts (a new pizza place opened in town) from the bias (it's the best pizza place in town!)
"Advertising is a cancer" is the moderate position, in that it assumes the patient can be saved. My personal view is that art that has been infected by advertising should be taken out back and shot.
I'm glad you enjoyed the show! Again, my personal opinion is that we gather more enjoyment out of these things if we spend a modicum of effort to curate our experiences rather than being spoon-fed the slop with the largest marketing budget.
As for "we're smart adults": The research on cognitive biases wrt advertising is settled. No, we're really really really not smrt.
Edit: I realized I am criticizing without offering a solution to my 2nd para. Think about the art (music / games / movies / comics) you like. Find those artists on the internet and see what art they recommend, and then consume that.
There is nothing remotely moderate about saying “advertising is a cancer”. It removes a massive industry from relevance, and condemns a whole lot of performance artists to unemployment. Advertising creates space for artists and sponsored performance spaces are the only performance spaces in many cities.
This reads like elitism. There is amazing art being made with a zero dollar ad budgets and amazing art being made with massive budgets. Those of us in small cities only get to see art because of advertising.
We went to see the Savannah Bananas tonight…they have a very dramatic “start the clock” opening. But when the clock starts, there’s 2:00 until the game is over.
It was kinda nice to know that it would end at a specific time.
My family went to see the July 4 fireworks at our minor league stadium this summer. I remember thinking “it’s 2-2, what if there’s extra innings? My kids will be devastated.”
I hope we as a society can find ways to keep baseball interesting…it’s really a beautiful game.
One of the interesting experiences I have being a member both of this community and the baseball analytics community is seeing posts like this, where apparently the author thinks that they're the only one who had the idea to look at this, shared widely within the hacker community because it comes from one of their own. Rest assured, within the _baseball_ community, this has been discussed and analyzed to death - it just doesn't get posted here because nobody mentions using unix tools to do it, because it isn't really relevant.
And many others, these are two early and relatively canonical ones. If folks reading this post are interested enough in baseball, please, come join us in the baseball analytics community where this is merely the very tippy top of the iceberg of interesting things.
The pitch clock is undoubtedly the most impactful of the changes made recently to speed up the game. However, other changes were implemented alongside it that have contributed in meaningful ways:
- Limit on the number of times per plate appearance a pitcher can "disengage" by stepping off/calling time or making a pickoff move.
- Limit on the number of times per plate appearance a batter can "disengage" by stepping out/calling time.
- Minimum of 3 batters must be faced by an incoming relief pitcher (or must finish the half-inning)
- Limit on the number of mound visits per game
- Larger bases
- Elimination (mostly) of the defensive "shift"
- Team at bat starts with an automatic "ghost" runner on 2nd base in extra innings
I like the 1, 2, and 4 changes. My feelings about 3 and 6 are mixed. Absolutely dislike the last.
While I also dislike the ghost runner, I can't deny that it's been a net positive for the game. By mostly eliminating marathon extra-inning slogs, not only does it speed up the game, but it also makes it much harder for teams to run out of pitchers they can safely use, which reduces injuries and ensures that we are not subjected to watching two backup catchers throw 48mph Eephus pitches in the 17th inning, long after they stopped selling beer.
Long extra inning games are pretty rare. I too hate the “Manfred Man” but the players and coaches overwhelmingly approve of it. I think that using the ghost runner at the start of the 12th inning would be a good compromise.
Reminding me of the Mariners playoffs game a couple seasons ago that lasted 18 innings. That was bizarre to watch. I forget who they were facing. Astros I think?
I'm in favor of compromise, but why the 12th inning? Haven't looked at the data but from memory it does kind of feel like games that get to the 12th inning tend to last into, say, the 15th or later.
I think 12th based on (and I cannot emphasize this enough) vibes instead of data would be fine.
10th definitely feels too soon (it's basically the 9th), and the 11th still kinda feels too soon too.
If anything, I'd argue it should be fine to ask your closer/reliever to pitch an extra inning (the 10th) "as-is". The 11th makes you burn an extra reliever, and that should be okay.
The 12th is where I'd start to say "okay, wind it down, we're all losing now".
Again, just vibes.
I see it as a negative. Too many games are lost because a reliever gives up a couple fly ball outs and the Manfred Man comes round to score. I’d rather see ties than these fake wins.
Ties are allowed, but only in very special circumstances. If for some reason they can’t keep playing, the game is supposed to be suspended and then restarted at a later date. But if it’s the last time the two teams play each other in the season and the playoff tiebreaker rules aren’t an issue, they just end the game in a tie. It doesn’t show up in the standings, so you probably didn’t even realize it happens! The player stats count, however.
The last tie in baseball was in 2016 - Cubs vs Pirates. The game ended in the 6th inning due to rain.
I think I would be more OK with the ghost runner of it kicked in for beyond the 10th or 11th inning.
This is blasphemy.
One man’s slog is another man’s epic.
Baseball is supposed to be slow.
In a better would we would have slowed down life and society to match baseball’s pace, not turned it in to a TikTok abomination.
If you look at the article, you can see that games have been getting progressively slower since records started being kept back in the 1920s. The recent rule changes have managed to cut the duration back to what they were in the early 80s.
By your logic, the games my mom grew up watching weren't slow enough, and the games my grandma watched were true blasphemy at around 2 hours flat.
Meanwhile, from my wife's perspective, I spend all afternoon watching even these sped-up games.
Does watching or listening to baseball feel too fast-paced? I haven't played much attention to baseball in many years, but I agree with you, baseball is supposed to be slow.
Nothing cooler than staying up till 1:30 am with a radio under the covers to listen to the end of a 14 inning game.
All that baseball they’ve stolen from us just so the degenerate gamblers can get their fix quicker.
The ghost runner rule is by far the most ridiculous. A pitcher can give up no hits, and get an ER and the L in extra innings. Make it make sense. Baseball is also telling on itself here because that rule does not apply in the playoffs.
>A pitcher can give up no hits, and get an ER....
The ghost runner does not count as an earned run.
I hate the removal of the shift. I thought it was such an interesting innovation to the game, and the fact that baseball allowed for such things part of its magic.
I'm with you. I think it should only apply to games that have fairly clearly gotten "stuck" and things are just dragging - like others have suggested, 12th inning seems like a reasonable start.
I've always felt a lot of intensity going into the 9th inning in any sort of lose came, even moreso if it's tied. And before the manfred man, that carried through if we went to the 10th or 11th.
Now it feels like as soon as we get to extra innings it's a shitshow. It's one thing if a pitcher has made a series of mistakes (or the fielders behind him) and you end up with someone on second and you throw a passed ball and someone scores. It's another when the first pitch of the half inning is a passed ball and this bizarro zombie runner scores on you.
I want to watch teams have to put together a string of "good baseball" moments to win, or at the very least watch a trainwreck in action if one team loses the game more than the other team won it. Or the majesty of a well-hit long ball, ideally with an excellent bat flip. The only thing that should be able to walk off the game in the very first at-bat of the bottom half of the inning is a home run.
Absolutely nobody likes the Manfred runner except the players. The players like it because they get to leave work earlier and less tired.
Worth nothing the rule doesn't apply to the post season.
"Absolutely nobody" is trivially false.
Baseball games are way too long even before they get to extra innings. The two hour limit is the most important rule change that makes bananaball superior (but their other changes are also universally positive).
The lack of a time limit is to many one of the key elements of the game that differentiated it from pretty much every other professional sport.
“It ain’t over til the arbitrary time limit” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
Pandering to the few diehards who can pay attention to more than 100 games a year on every day of the week including weekdays for 4+ hours at a time is not a sustainable way to build or maintain interest in your sport in newer generations.
The people who watch baseball and care about baseball don't like the Manfred runner. The people who complain that "baseball games are way too long even before they get to extra innings" aren't people who watch baseball and care about baseball. I don't care about the options baseball haters have about baseball rules.
Gamblers probably like it so they can get the results of their bet more predictably on time
The unlimited pickoffs were ridiculous. It technically meant the game could simply not progress until either the pitcher or the runner made a mistake. Glad it's no longer the case.
[0]: https://www.mlb.com/news/vince-coleman-drew-most-pickoff-thr... There was an at-bat with 17 pickoff attempts. It only took 7 minutes!
I like most of these but I hate the banned shift. If you can't hit it where they're not, you don't deserve to get on base!
I guess the problem is the shift just felt gimmicky.
Personally, I'm with you though. If you're a MLB hitter who can't hit a giant opposite field hole, that's kind of too bad.
To be pedantic I don’t think the 3-batter rule mentions relief pitchers. If a team wanted to use an opening pitcher to face only the first batter and then replace him, that would also be against the rules.
https://www.mlb.com/glossary/rules/three-batter-minimum
If you’re going to be pedantic, don’t rely on a glossary. 5.10 (g) specifically mentions both starting and substitute pitchers.
It’s truly a shame that I had to mention this because it adds nothing to the conversation.
The wildest thing about this chart is that it shows that from the 1920s to the 1940s you could conceivably watch a baseball game:
- that took less than 2 hours
- was in the afternoon
One baseball writer theorized that part of the decline in interest in baseball amongst kids is b/c they moved to night games so kids couldn't watch anymore (bed time etc etc).
e.g. many older people speak fondly of getting home from school and listening / watching a baseball game of their home team.
A few problems:
1. baseball competes in a sea of media and multimedia options and its competition has been growing ever since TV moved into the cable-era. Now it also has to compete with internet, games, social media, etc. Theres only so much time and attention for people to focus on it.
2. Long season. I love baseball but you can go 2-3 weeks not watching a game and have missed nothing.
3. Cost to go to games plus location of stadiums in car-centric areas often means painful commutes to the games for most Americans and then bringing two kids is like making it a $400 affair between parking, food, souvenirs etc. That's expensive for a lot of people.
The exit of people from the cities into the burbs in the mid-20th did a lot of damage to the idea of going to a game.
All true.
Meanwhile, we saw the Savannah Bananas tonight. I wonder if their brand of baseball will find appeal more broadly? It’s more spectacle than sport but it’s the most enthusiastic I’ve seen a crowd for anything other than football.
Bananaball is interesting but its more similar to the Harlem Globetrotters than anything in the MLB pipeline.
Which is fine, its fun, its ridiculous, but its not baseball.
I mean, theatre always has its place
Agreed, this is pretty huge. I think at one point in my early teen years (I think 2008? My recollection was that it was a year the Phillies were in it, although that could have been 2009) there was a game in the World Series that got postponed and had to be restarted the next night, and because it already was a few innings in, the remainder the next night started maybe at 8 and ended at 10, which was much nicer given that I always struggled with the early morning starts for school.
The other major thing I think affected it is that in most of the markets where baseball is most popular, ticket prices skyrocketed over the past few decades, and a lot of the more popular teams would sell out for almost every game pretty early on in the year. Growing up in the Boston area, it was pretty noticeable how much more of a hassle it became for my dad to take my brothers and I to Red Sox games in the early 2000s[1]. In my earliest years, I remember my father taking us each to one game individually each season as well as usually a couple with all of us there, but it got to the point where eventually he'd just buy all of us tickets for one game because getting tickets to 5-6 separate games just wasn't worth the money. He and I started going to a lot of minor league games in my high school years just because we enjoyed getting to see baseball in person enough, but my brothers generally weren't as interested in taking an hour or two to ride to New Hampshire to see the Fishercats or something similar. I have to imagine that this phenomenon made it a lot harder to get kids interested in baseball for my generation.
[1] Yes, this also happened to coincide with the years that the Red Sox started doing really well, but that wasn't necessarily the cause. Their streak of sell-outs that lasted close to a decade iirc started earlier than the 2004 season, and the prices were not nearly as high (even after adjusting for inflation) in previous times they had made it to the World Series. My dad had told stories about going to see large numbers of games despite being a mostly in debt grad student in the mid eighties, including the year they won the penant in 1986. Baseball just wasn't as expensive to see in person until relatively recently.
The speed of games in those days was influenced by very little reliance on relievers (it's why Cy Young is the leader in wins AND losses, though even in recent history, Nolan Ryan had more complete games in some years that many pitchers today have in their ENTIRE careers). The need for breaks between innings, switching pitchers, etc to fit with TV commercial breaks is also an influence.
> - was in the afternoon
There's more night games than day games, but day games aren't unusual (at least they aren't unusual for west coast teams)
Older boomers attended school in the days when there existed
I forget whether it was 1966 or 1967 that a classmate followed the game without getting caught.Until recently I had only ever been to one baseball game.. saw the Jays when I was 10. I remember falling asleep at the game because it was so slow and boring, and never really watched baseball after that.
But in the last couple years I’ve seen the Mets and Phillies multiple times, and it’s now one of my favourite sports to watch thanks to the pitch clock increasing the pace of the game. I’d be really curious to see data on how many new fans the league got after the change.
It's too soon to tell. Here's total attendance data:
https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/misc.shtml
COVID did such a number on attendance that it's hard to separate anything else out. It has been increasing since it bottomed out but is still below the peak.
The best I can say: it was falling before the pandemic and it's now above where it was even before everything shut down. So... maybe?
> I remember falling asleep at the game because it was so slow and boring, and never really watched baseball after that.
If you listen to people talking about how they loved going to the game with their family, it's usually about what they did to pass the time during the boredom. It was America's pastime, because you needed to figure out how to pass time during the boredom.
The pitch clock is nice though, gives a rythym to action.
That said, minor league baseball is a lot more fun to watch because there's a lot more variance, and they have a lot of stuff going on between the innings to keep you awake ;)
This is why the Savannah Bananas (and the banana league) are so popular. Banana-ball draws sellout crowds wherever they play. The main focus is "don't be boring."
The graph shoes interquartile range, so this wouldn't be a factor, but worth noting: baseball also changed its rules on extra inning games in the past few years which speeds things up. A runner starts on second base which reduces the 0-run extra innings that are responsible for the 19 inning game I remember as a kid. [0]
[0] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-jul-10-sp-alrdp...
Anyone know why they are still so much longer than pre-80’s? Is it all the pitching changes? That’s maybe 12-15 minutes. More commercials?
A game in 2 hours or less would be pretty awesome.
A summer afternoon, static on the radio, the low hum of an announcer calling balls and strikes like he’s reading scripture in a Midwest church. Baseball used to be stitched together with silence. You heard the game as much in the pauses as in the plays.
Then the voice came in. Once the game hit the airwaves, it slowed. Had to. The ball waited for the broadcast.
Out of the dead-ball fog came the home run. No more bunting, no more clever thefts of second. Now it was swing, admire, trot. Alongside the homers came the walks and the strikeouts. Fewer balls in play. More staring, less running. Time thickened, and the nature of the game was trending towards longer games.
World War II shaved minutes from the clock. With so many players overseas, the talent pool shrank. The games got shorter because they became simpler. When the talent came back, the games got longer, largely because, after 1947, the game was flooded with previously segregated talent and players who were returning from overseas.
In the 60s, pitchers took over. Dominance from the mound. ERAs dropped. Batting averages plummeted. In 1968 they called it the Year of the Pitcher, then called the rulebook to fix it. Scoring came back, and with it, longer games.
Television followed with commercial breaks and camera angles. The game had to pause for sponsors. The seventh-inning stretch now came with a soft drink.
In the 70s, the bullpen became a revolving door. Specialists. Situational matchups. Every pitching change added minutes. Coaches walked the mound like they were heading to confession.
And the game kept expanding. OPS rose. More runners meant more pitches. More strikeouts meant more throws. Every batter became a saga.
If you look at the graph, you can see a trend that matches well with changes in baseball. We could probably break down every high and low to describe the shift based on rules, personal changes, etc.
Then came the pitch clock. No more dawdling. No more meditative pacing between pitches. And now a reliever has to face at least three batters in an inning. No more one-pitch exits.
It’s not that baseball got lazy. It got layered, commercialized, optimized, and strategized, but it forgot about time management.
The graph shows an outline, with the trends representing a chapter in baseball history, which is very cool.
> It’s not that baseball got lazy. It got layered, commercialized, optimized, and strategized, but it forgot about time management.
This is why I can't stand modern basketball. Deliberate fouling in the last quarter is optimal and strategic as far as winning. I'm sure those extra commercial slots are enticing to the networks as well. But it's boring as hell when the last 5 minutes stretch out to an hour, and the final result now boils down to a lucky draw instead of skill. Any sense of fun has been lost.
You’re a wonderful writer. It made me curious enough to look at your previous comments. (Your comment about your grandma who baked was also like a wonderful short story but in fewer words.) Do you write books as well, by chance? Or a blog, or anything like that? Sorry to anyone if this seems weird. A simple upvote didn’t seem enough.
Thanks for pointing that out, seriously.
For a while, I was inflicting baseball history on the unsuspecting readers of Pitcher List[1], until the twin boulders of professional and personal life demanded I focus on pushing them.
One persistent frustration is that my writing voice never quite captured how I meant to express myself. So, this past year, I've been working (sometimes stubbornly) to close that gap, assuming I take the time to think and edit. Your kind words mean a lot.
Most days, pray for a recent sabbatical, I try to post a daily baseball history note[2]. I hope to resume this ritual after this weekend, assuming the stars (and schedules) stay in proper hyperdrive alignment and maintain the boulder automation.
As the chaos of my life dwindles, a blog, or book (or both) remains a possibility.
--- [1] https://pitcherlist.com/author/mat-kovach/ [2] https://bsky.app/profile/siddfinch.xyz
Excuse me, are you James Earl Jones in Field of Dreams? Terence Mann, is that you?
I logged in just to uptoot this. As a small market season ticket holder, i appreciate you.
Thank you! I truly appreciate it. Baseball fans supporting each other is one of the best part of the game!
I thought this was some famous passage about baseball. Bravo.
Kind and humbling words, thank you. As a Cleveland Guardians fan, I need a boost!
brilliant
Assuming approximately 0 commercials in 1920 with a runtime of 110 minutes -> 140 minutes. I'm trying to decide if there's 30 minutes of commercials, or not? I'm thinking about the standard sitcom (TV) commercial density which is a 23-24m show with 6-7m of commercials (25–33%). So... 30m seems in range?
I wouldn't say they're "so much longer" now (since the pitch clock was implemented, that is). This year, 9 inning games averaged 2:38. In 1960, they ran 2:33. There are lots of factors that contribute to longer gametime. A couple that correlate with the general trend for longer:
Commercial breaks are currently limited to 2 minutes by rule, and it takes some time just to run on and off the field, so I am dubious of the impact of that. (Though the rule has changed, and I forget whether there were an additional 20 minutes because of that back in the 1990s/2000s.)That said, unless it were a stellar pitching duel, I'd really despise constant sub-2 hour games.
https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/misc.shtml
https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/bat.shtml
https://www.mlb.com/glossary/rules/warmup-pitches
Yes, the pitch clock and the relievers' requirement to face at least three batters in an inning have done a very good job of handling game times.
At some point, as the game continues to evolve, I think we'll see an upward swing in game times in the future, but I don't believe it will trend as high as it has before. I think that sub-three-hour games will remain the sweet spot going forward.
Now, for sub-two-hour games, this is one I wish I could watch and re-watch
https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1908/B10020CLE1908.htm
In the middle of a pennant race, Addie Joss pitched a 74-pitch perfect game against Ed Walsh, who had already won 39 games that year. The game kept Cleveland in the running for the pennant. Game time? 1:40 minutes. The minimum number of batters for a nine-inning game is 54, this game had 56.
Wouldn’t the minimum be 51? 932 =54, but if the team batting second is winning after the top of the 9th then they don’t need to play the bottom of the ninth, so subtract 3? Not a baseball person.
I thought the same thing.
And if you have rain , they can call the game "complete" if the losing team had 5 half innings at bat. So that could be 28. Assume 27 outs and one home run by the home team.
Not for no-hitters, perfect games. The pitcher has to complete nine innings.
You are correct. I should have clarified that for this game, Cleveland was visiting Chicago, so they got to bat in the ninth.
Commercials? I haven't been to a game since the 90s, but I don't recall them pausing for commercials. Do they do that now?
The time between half-innings increases, so the radio and TV could play commercials on the broadcast. Pitching changes are longer, etc. You don't see it much at the game, but if you are one of the folks who used to listen to the game on the radio, at the game itself, you get a feel for how the flow of the game is affected by the broadcasts.
> You don't see it much at the game
I haven't paid enough attention at baseball games. At hockey games, if you can see the scorekeeper, they have a lamp at the glass that will come on during a stopage to let the refs know it's time for a commercial (if you watch for this, you can get a jump on the crowd if you need a bathroom break or refreshments). You can usually predict a commercial timeout, they've got guidelines that are pretty consistently applied [1]
[1] https://nhlofficials.com/know-the-rules/week-20-need-a-break... search for "Commercial’s time-outs should be taken at the first whistle"
I meant to also say that the light doesn't go off until the commercial break is done, so they don't drop the puck before the broadcasters are ready. Typically an off-ice official holds a door open and stands in it to also signal not to start, if it looks like everyone is ready to go a bit early.
Not during batting. For pitching changes they do and pitching changes are more frequent now that starters “only” pitch 100 pitches or less. Time between innings seems to have a higher ad load though it’s inconsistent from what I can tell depending perhaps on the market.
My guess is higher run totals.
Maybe surprisingly, total plate appearances per game is relatively stable. https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/misc.shtml.
Pitching has been dominating hitting the last few years and runs (and batting averages) are both relatively low at the moment.
Total pitchers used, however, is up.
The game has changed dramatically since the 1970s. My favourite example is from 1979.
In 1979, Phil Niekro lead the major leagues with 342 innings pitched. In 2025, Logan Webb lead the majors with 207 innings pitched.
Modern pitchers throw about 2/3 the pitches that pre-80s pitchers threw. Part of this is player safety - baseball destroyed some amazing arms. And part of it is the fact that relievers today tend to throw 98+.
Sorta related: I feel instant replay challenges have sucked the life out of the game. Arguing with the ump over bad calls has never accomplished anything, but it's entertaining, it gets the blood flowing; it always made me feel more connected to the game and other fans. Now, managers just request an instant replay challenge, we wait a few minutes, and that's it - accurate, but boring.
For example, I watched around 100 games this season, but I can't recall a single instant replay challenge. However, ask anyone from St. Louis about "game 6" (typically, that's all you need to say!), and they'll get fired up, ranting about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyt1xEvqqow . Forty years later, people still remember that blown call like it was yesterday.
I'm fairly confident you're in the minority of serious fans on this one. Anecdotal, but I don't personally know a single big baseball fan that wants to go back to no instant replay.
Which doesn't mean they're necessarily happy with where instant replay is - particularly since New York relies on their own specific camera feeds, and sometimes don't have the same angles available as those watching on TV do. It's resulted in some fairly rage inducing incidents where we can clearly see the call was majorly blown from home, but the replay room can't overturn it from the angles they have. Every official camera feed should be available for them to use, imo.
What is shorter games doing for attendance, concession sales, ad sales on the TV broadcast? Seems like you want people stuck in the park for as long as possible (well, at least until they make them stop selling alcohol) but if that's too long, people simply won't go. Meanwhile, I have no idea whether longer or shorter games are better for TV. I would guess shorter is better? After an hour of the same insurance commercial over and over, you're either going to switch insurance companies or you're not. Seeing the ad 3 more times probably isn't worth very much.
You might be surprised. During the peak game length seasons, people would start trickling out around like the 5th or 6th inning, and by the 8th or 9th, the stadium could get surprisingly sparse even if it started full. My dad and my brothers and I used to have a habit of moving down from our bleachers seats after the seventh inning because there would be enough empty seats that we could often move into ones within the first few rows behind one of the dugouts to get a closer view of the last couple innings (and maybe increase our chances of getting a foul ball if we were lucky, which we generally weren't!). This got especially common when they tried to curb people driving home drunk by ending beer sales after the seventh inning, at which point instead of sticking around to sober up, quite a lot of people just opted to leave once they couldn't buy any more beer.
Where I am, the people I know are spending a lot less on concessions & alcohol. Not because of the shorter game but because the beer prices have become astronomical and the food quality has become terrible.
So instead we pregame nearby, maybe have a beer, and then go out afterwards.
The $1 hotdogs at Riverfront Stadium were a lot better than the $7 dogs at Great American Ballpark.
I went to a Metallica concert at a large basketball stadium this summer. The concession stands were charging $22 for a beer. I can get that same can of beer at my grocery store for $1.25.
That's one of the reasons inflation doesn't scare me as much as it does other people. When it gets out of hand I always find easy ways to adjust some unnecessary spending. I'm eating healthier since I decided to spend less money on food by cooking.
Groceries are also impacted by inflation - plenty of people scared by not being able to meet even basic alimentary needs due to increasing costs. Google a bit for “poverty meals”.
Sure, but it was low-hanging fruit for me to cook for $4/meal rather than eat out for $15/meal. Maybe I'd have been able to cook for $3/meal if I'd started a year earlier but I was still capturing a big relative efficiency.
My experience from going to giants games is that people leave when they want, not when the game is over (unless it's a nail biter). Same with arriving.
I will say, our personal experience and the comments of many fellow fans. The games seem more engaging, fun, and it's easier to be present and attentive for the whole game. That mentality and experience makes for better attendance in future games and a general attitude of "its worth the time".
Yes, you want people around for longer. But it's bad if people don't tune in or attend because of the time commitment. So it's a tradeoff.
It's amazing how much non-action time there is an NFL broadcast. Some people don't watch because of it, but I suppose enough do.
Apparently less than 15-minutes of athletic action in a typical 3-hour game, with ~45-minutes devoted to advertising: [2020] How Much American Football Is Even in an American Football Broadcast? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22218909
This explains why NFL RedZone exists.
Fun comparison, a typical Formula 1 Grand Prix clocks in at ~1.5 hours. Live race broadcasts (e.g. Sky Sports F1) will typically show the entire race with no commercial breaks or interruptions. Same goes for MotoGP (e.g. TNT Sports), where a sprint race (~10-12 laps) takes just 25 minutes, not including post race podium and interviews.
English Premier League game durations come in at just under 2-hours with a full hour of athletic action, the remaining 50% occupied by a 15-minutes halftime, substitutions, free kicks, and a mere 10-minutes of commercial interruptions.
Ever since my parents got a DVR, my dad switched to recording NFL games and then only starting to watch them until maybe an hour or so after the kickoff. He'd fast forward through the numerous commercial breaks (like before AND after each kickoff whenever someone scores? come on...) and eventually catch up near the end of the game.
Yeah, NFL games are kind of crazy. I missed a MNF game recently and saw it on YouTube the next evening (and somehow I hadn't spoiled the score for myself). It was less than 2 hours without a single play or comment edited out. Aired live, it was closer to 3:30. Literally 1/3 commercials. It's a little excessive.
If I get into a rhythm with the "advance ten-seconds" button between plays I can get down to around an hour, without missing any plays, or pre-snap action. It'd be a lot less, even, but there are times we want to see the replays, and other times I "miss" and have to jump back. It's amazing how much dead time there is in American football.
Well, speeding up the gameplay doesn't affect the number of commercial breaks. There are 18 guaranteed commercial breaks per game (two per inning). I suppose the density of ads goes up. Good deal for advertisers.
(Additional commercial breaks may happen due to mid-inning pitching changes, and I suppose it's possible that the pitch clock affects the number of pitching changes, but it's not obvious to me whether they'd become more frequent or less frequent.)
(Though separately, they did make other rules to reduce the frequency of pitching changes. But OTOH pitching changes have been gradually becoming more common for decades, with starters hardly ever completing a game anymore.)
Anytime the inning ends, or the pitcher changes, there's a 2 minute pause. Save for the mid-7th inning, when it jumps to 3 minutes. I believe they are longer during the All Star Game, and, maybe, the WS. I didn't notice them longer during the recent Wild Card.
They typically jump to commercial on every break. I watch all my games on delay, and for local broadcasts, it's 3 clicks on the skip button (1.5m) and we're back in the ball park. On national broadcasts, it's 4 clicks and we typically return with the ball in flight or the batter swinging at the first pitch. They cut it really close.
During things like mound visits, they'll slip in an interstitial ad, that's about 10s. There's also voice over ads from the announcers during short pauses (between batters, say), which is almost always team related vs a sponsor, but not as bad as on the radio. On the radio its "First pitch brought to you by...", things like that.
My nits on advertising are the shoulder patches for the players and the stencil on the mound. I particularly hate when a national broadcast layers in something over the batters eye, the locals do not do that. Last year, the Umpires were carrying sponsor patches (some crypto company), I honestly can't recall if they were wearing anything this year. The rotating banners in the back that are in park or green screens overlayed by broadcast behind the plate don't really bother me. I always find it amusing when they turn almost entirely Japanese when the Dodgers are playing.
The pitch clock and shift changes have been great, I love the game. Yankee/Red Sox series last week was a nailbiter. Being at the the local park when the Yankees are in town is a blast.
Amusing to see "dos2unix" pop up in the middle of the article. Python and Pandas can handle newlines directly, one pattern is:
The standard library `csv` used to expect files in binary mode in 2.x and it annoyed me to no end.
Baseball should be 7 innings.
This would more than halve the amount of relief pitchers needed, so the MLBPA will never ever think about agreeing to it.
Starting pitchers averaged ~5.5 innings per game in 2024, and going 7 is hardly a rare occurrence. You would basically just have starters, 2-3 relief pitchers, one "long-man." vs. the average of 8 on the roster today.
> Games are now roughly as long as they were in the early ’80s, so the powers at MLB have cut about four decades of fat from the game. And they did it without reducing the number of commercials, because they’d never do that.
The commercialization of baseball is really ruining the game for me at times.
Company billboards and logos are in almost every square inch of empty space inside the stadiums now, making them look like giant versions of race cars with way too many tacky sponsor stickers. And just like race car drivers, these sponsor logos are creeping into the players' uniforms more and more each year, now placed prominently on one of the shoulders. If they made it into the jerseys I guess the hats are next to get ruined.
One of the worst examples are the led ad screens behind the batter, which sometimes in the tv broadcast they digitally overlay a different advertiser than what the folks in the stadium see, and it creates this messed up outline around the batter/catcher/ump that makes it look like the entire game is fake.
Then there are the tv announcers who are now required to attribute the replay on every exciting play to a different sponsor, like "this homerun replay is brought to you by Hefty! ... blah blah blah". They do it for homeruns, doubles, stolen bases, great catches, pitcher changes, even manager challenges!
But probably the most insidious practice is during an active game mid-inning, sometimes after a strikeout before the next batter gets to the plate, the tv broadcast will shrink the game down into one corner of the screen and play a regular, albeit shortened, commercial on most of the screen. No more announcer analysis about who is coming up to bat, or any other talking points relevant to the moment. Instead it's garbage commercial audio all the way up to the moment the pitcher is about to release the next pitch.
It's almost like they're trying to ruin the integrity of the sport. But I know the truth is simple corporate greed.
> But probably the most insidious practice is during an active game mid-inning, sometimes after a strikeout before the next batter gets to the plate, the tv broadcast will shrink the game down into one corner of the screen and play a regular, albeit shortened, commercial on most of the screen.
It's common for curling broadcasts to do this for lead stones (so a quarter of stones thrown). Rage-inducing.
> Company billboards and logos are in almost every square inch of empty space
This isn't new. Have you ever seen pictures of stadiums 100 years ago? I can recall people being upset a while back that the Green Monster was starting to be covered by ads. And yet one can find photos from way back when of it pretty much full of billboards.
For the record, I have managed to limit advertising for tykes to near 0. Young enough where control over electronics is viable.
As soon as a game pops up, the only unfiltered ad exposure basically, and it’s glue. The bright colors, the subconscious techniques, the hidden waveforms, whatever magic sauce they use to steal attention WORKS.
It’s like seeing a fairy tapping kids on the head and stealing all of their attention as they become droolingly attentive zombies to whatever drivel reserves the sales screen real estate for that time slice.
It is concerningly effective, and I can bet most everyone grew up saturated with it. Bordering on harassment/abuse since it can not be entirely avoided.
This is why I didn’t keep my child away from ads. Kids have extremely plastic brains and I wanted to get that neural plasticity to protect my kid for the future. The ad industry spends more money figuring kids out than the education industry - hiding ads makes ads exciting.
My kid is nine and they’re ad proof.
I view advertising as a toxin you can’t build natural immunity to vs a venom that can be acclimated to. Lead, not capsaicin.
Advertising is profitable due to subconscious connections manifesting to conscious judgements shifting. You can never be protected from this influence.
It’s still diffusing into growing neural nets, even if mind-numbing filters are being used to glancingly minimize the potential ill-effects. An analogy is a sapling oak growing on an angle for 10 years, then correcting. Sure it’s still a tree and fine, maybe even some character. The tree that grew straight, never having to avoid an obstacle is taller and sturdier against the elements, less likely to get eaten by short animals. The brain is plastic, but it does solidify as you age.
Just some thoughts.
This makes sense. Growing up I had a friend whose parents didn’t let him watch tv. Whenever he came over to play he would stare almost drooling at the tv (or if it wasn’t on, begging to turn it on) while the rest of us who were allowed to watch tv played and were easily able to ignore it.
Advertising is a cancer on society. It makes everything worse.
It almost allows people to create their own real estate and rent it out at growing prices as the crowds increase. And when they max out at what one would pay for one piece of that real estate, they just rent off other pieces of real estate (more ads)
The best concert I ever saw was one I only knew about from a TV commercial.
And I realized after become aggressive about skipping all commercials that I'm no longer seeing movies other than the most mainstream franchise ones that it's impossible not to learn about. I used to come across trailers for movies and now I never do.
As with all things, the far extremist take (advertising is a cancer) is misguided.
Advertising is information. We're smart adults and can separate the facts (a new pizza place opened in town) from the bias (it's the best pizza place in town!)
"Advertising is a cancer" is the moderate position, in that it assumes the patient can be saved. My personal view is that art that has been infected by advertising should be taken out back and shot.
I'm glad you enjoyed the show! Again, my personal opinion is that we gather more enjoyment out of these things if we spend a modicum of effort to curate our experiences rather than being spoon-fed the slop with the largest marketing budget.
As for "we're smart adults": The research on cognitive biases wrt advertising is settled. No, we're really really really not smrt.
Edit: I realized I am criticizing without offering a solution to my 2nd para. Think about the art (music / games / movies / comics) you like. Find those artists on the internet and see what art they recommend, and then consume that.
Nightmares on Wax doesn't have a huge marketing budget, but okay.
There is nothing remotely moderate about saying “advertising is a cancer”. It removes a massive industry from relevance, and condemns a whole lot of performance artists to unemployment. Advertising creates space for artists and sponsored performance spaces are the only performance spaces in many cities.
This reads like elitism. There is amazing art being made with a zero dollar ad budgets and amazing art being made with massive budgets. Those of us in small cities only get to see art because of advertising.
We went to see the Savannah Bananas tonight…they have a very dramatic “start the clock” opening. But when the clock starts, there’s 2:00 until the game is over.
It was kinda nice to know that it would end at a specific time.
My family went to see the July 4 fireworks at our minor league stadium this summer. I remember thinking “it’s 2-2, what if there’s extra innings? My kids will be devastated.”
I hope we as a society can find ways to keep baseball interesting…it’s really a beautiful game.
Cool now take away commercial breaks.
One of the interesting experiences I have being a member both of this community and the baseball analytics community is seeing posts like this, where apparently the author thinks that they're the only one who had the idea to look at this, shared widely within the hacker community because it comes from one of their own. Rest assured, within the _baseball_ community, this has been discussed and analyzed to death - it just doesn't get posted here because nobody mentions using unix tools to do it, because it isn't really relevant.
See for example:
https://blogs.fangraphs.com/how-have-the-new-rules-changed-t...
https://www.baseball-reference.com/friv/rules-changes-stats....
And many others, these are two early and relatively canonical ones. If folks reading this post are interested enough in baseball, please, come join us in the baseball analytics community where this is merely the very tippy top of the iceberg of interesting things.