The commissioner was finally ready to acknowledge that baseball had a problem. Games were simply taking too long to play.
"I think we’ve lost fans with night games running too late for the fan who has to get up and go to work in the morning," he admitted.
Acceptance, as they say, is the first step toward change. Do these words mean that Rob Manfred is poised — at long last — to take definitive action to speed up the game?
Not at all. The quote above didn’t come from the current commissioner, but from one of his predecessors, Ford Frick, who was speaking in April 1956.
And why was the normally placid Frick so worried? Games the previous summer had run an average of two hours and 31 minutes, making 1955 the first season in which it took more than two and a half hours to travel from first pitch to final out.
Frick didn’t do anything about this expanding length — he preferred to remain inert whenever possible — but at least he was smart enough to be concerned. Many of today’s owners and players, on the other hand, blindly claim there’s absolutely no reason to fret, even though games these days commonly drag on for three or even four hours.
It’s hard to believe in our sluggish era, but the average length of games during the first postwar season, 1946, was a brisk two hours and seven minutes. You read that right: 2:07.
The upward creep began the following year, with the typical game growing four minutes longer. Nine straight increases brought baseball to 2:31 by 1955, stirring Frick from his natural somnolence — though only briefly.
Not that his successors have done anything about the problem, either. All sorts of causes have been identified — longer commercial breaks, more relief pitchers, batters constantly stepping out of the box, pitchers seemingly afraid to let go of the ball — but not one has been remedied.
Postwar time-of-game milestones were exceeded at a depressingly steady pace while the baseball establishment twiddled its thumbs. Here’s the progression, based on data from Baseball Reference, showing the first season in which each five-minute average was reached or surpassed:
1948 — 2:15
1950 — 2:20
1952 — 2:25
1954 — 2:30
1960 — 2:35
1982 — 2:40
1986 — 2:45
1987 — 2:50
1994 — 2:55
2000 — 3:00
2014 — 3:05
2019 — 3:10
You might have noticed the two-decade pause in the middle of this list. Baseball’s time problem seemed to have solved itself in the 1960s and 1970s, with the average length settling into a range between 2:30 and 2:39, even dipping as low as 2:27 in 1972. But the push toward longer games resumed in 1982, and the trend has been higher ever since.
Last year, 2019, was the worst yet, according to Baseball Reference, which clocked the average big-league game at three hours and 10 minutes. The slowest team in the majors, the Red Sox, posted a truly indolent average of 3:25. Sixteen of Boston’s 162 games in 2019 took more than four hours. Three — only three! — wrapped up in less than two and a half hours.
So what’s the big deal?
If longer games dialed up the action, there wouldn’t be any reason to talk about the clock. But the expanded length of today’s games offers no nutritional boost to the baseball fan. The extra time is nothing but filler, a spectator’s version of empty calories.
The typical nine-inning game in 2019 featured 17.43 hits by the two teams, virtually the same as the average of 17.51 in 1946. The number of batters was essentially identical: 77.32 per game in 2019, 77.20 in 1946.
Think of it this way: The average game got 63 minutes longer during that 73-year span, yet the results didn’t change at all. A fan in 1946 saw a hit every six minutes and 37 seconds. The pace slowed to one hit every 10 minutes and 37 seconds by 2019 — an additional lag of precisely four minutes.
Here’s a snapshot at 10-year intervals, showing the average gap between hits in a typical nine-inning game. The figures for 2020 cover the first seven weeks of the truncated schedule:
1950 — 7 minutes, 31 seconds between hits
1960 — 8 minutes, 48 seconds between hits
1970 — 8 minutes, 40 seconds between hits
1980 — 8 minutes, 26 seconds between hits
1990 — 9 minutes, 28 seconds between hits
2000 — 9 minutes, 24 seconds between hits
2010 — 9 minutes, 37 seconds between hits
2020 — 11 minutes, 6 seconds between hits
This list, to be sure, is only one statistical measure of a broad problem. We could add other indicators — the sharp upswing in strikeouts, the increase in elapsed time between pitches, the growth in the number of pitches seen by the typical batter — but the hit gap really tells the story. It reduces baseball’s dilemma to a simple equation: A longer wait for action equals greater boredom for fans.
We can discuss possible solutions in the months to come. The important step now is to admit that the major leagues have a problem. A serious problem.
Baseball owners and players may deny the danger, but millions of fans have already acknowledged the situation. They’ve switched allegiance to a different game that successfully portrays itself as action-packed.
The Gallup Poll reported in 1948 that baseball was the favorite sport of 39% of Americans. Football lagged badly at 17%. But the tide turned dramatically as baseball pumped its product full of tasteless filler. The most recent Gallup survey on sports, conducted a couple of years ago, found football favored by 37%, compared to baseball at just 9%.
If that doesn’t serve as a wakeup call for Rob Manfred and the owners, nothing could possibly awaken them from their Frick-like slumber.