THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Interesting that a one-run increase in scoring (1993-94) had no impact on game length.  Looks like games had already hit 175 minutes by 1992.  And the average number of pitchers has increased a lot since 1993 as well, so I suspect there are more mid-inning pitching changes.  Is there some offsetting factor keeping total game length the same?

Is there some offsetting factor keeping total game length the same?

Bud Selig and Joe West, of course.

Evening games used to start at 8 PM also. As they grew longer, start times were moved back to 7:30, then 7 PM.  Of course, if you go to a Red Sox game, a 6 PM start time might not get you out of Fenway by 10 PM.

"I am sure if we looked, the between-inning break has probably risen by one minute per inning.”

Where would that information be found?

It’s hard for me to believe that between-innings breaks have risen by one minute.  I remember them being at 2 minutes when I was listening to the Royals on radio in the mid-to-late 80s. And that wasn’t always coming back immediately to the first pitch of the inning, either.

So if games are 2:30 now from last pitch of old inning to first pitch of new inning, I wonder if the between-innings break has changed at all.

I have no hard data from the 80s, just my memory, which could be faulty, but I remember pretty clearly during very competitive and tense games having to wait what seemed like an eternity of 2 minutes till the game came back on.

You just gave me an idea… I’ve got a stop watch. Next game I watch on TV, I’ll pause the stopwatch during the commercial breaks, and just time the actual game playing time. Hmmm. Wonder if that’ll turn out to be about the same time a game length was in pre-TV days.

Devon/6, we have accurate time data on all the events in present-day games (since 2008).  It’s the games from previous decades where we don’t have detailed time data for accurate comparison.

Yeah, if you want to help out, put a stopwatch on “classic” games.  We have the duration of the game from first pitch to last pitch, including commercials.  So, put your stopwatch on game-action only, and the difference is the between-inning time.

Has anyone looked into the number of pitching during an inning over the time period.  It is at least extra minutes to get the pitcher in the game and to though his practice pitches