Baseball Durations After the Pitch Clock

My guess is higher run totals.

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?

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.

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:

  - pitchers/game: 2025: 4.29, 1960: 2.45
  - strikeouts/game: 2025: 8.36, 1960: 5.18

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

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?

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+.

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."

> 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 ;)

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?

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.

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.)

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.

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".

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.

Advertising is a cancer on society. It makes everything worse.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

I like the 1, 2, and 4 changes. My feelings about 3 and 6 are mixed. Absolutely dislike the last.

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

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!

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!

The standard library `csv` used to expect files in binary mode in 2.x and it annoyed me to no end.

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.

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.

> - 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)

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.

Older boomers attended school in the days when there existed

  - daytime World Series games
  - pocket-sized transistor radios
  - a corps of teachers who had not grown up around hand-held electronic devices

I forget whether it was 1966 or 1967 that a classmate followed the game without getting caught.

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.

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.