Sports Medley: The Main Reason Why Baseball Games
Are Too Long 24 May 18 by Tony Medley
One of the most important half
innings in the last 50 years of baseball occurred in the first half of
the Giants-Dodgers doubleheader on April 28. Giants’ manager Bruce Bochy
had typically run through his entire staff in a game that was already
lost so he inserted infielder Pablo Sandoval to pitch the top of the
ninth-inning against the Dodgers.
Sandoval pitched exactly the way
I used to pitch when I played in high school in the 50s. He threw a
pitch, got the ball back from the catcher, quickly got the sign and
threw another pitch. Each pitch was thrown within five seconds of the
preceding pitch. He threw 11 pitches. The half inning was completed in
two minutes 27 seconds, or 147 seconds. This is an average of less than
14 seconds per pitch, and that includes the fact that there were a
couple of foul balls that took up some time and there were three ground
ball outs, which also took up some time as the play had been made and
then the ball thrown around the infield twice as is typical after a
bases empty out.
This happening epitomizes that
the main problem with baseball, the slowness of play and the average
time of each game at 3 hours 9 minutes and growing, is pitchers taking
too long between pitches. In 1920, the average time of a baseball game
was 1 hour 47 minutes; in 1950 it was 2:20. It stayed steady at around
2:30 from 1960-80, then started creeping up to today when the game takes
almost twice as long to play as it did in 1920, and it’s mostly due to
dawdling pitchers.
The Babe Ruth-Lou Gehrig 1927
New York Yankees were called “5 o’clock lightning,” and the story why
was told by Yankees pitcher Myles Thomas in The Diary of Myles Thomas,
“All our games begin at 3:30 and it seems like all of our late-inning
rallies happen right about five o’clock, give or take fifteen minutes.”
After several late inning victories in a row, “Against the White Sox a
week ago, we loaded the bases in the ninth thanks to three Chicago
errors — then
Gehrig cleared them with a grand slam. In the locker room after the
game, (sportswriter) Paul Gallico of the Daily News and I were talking
about how the ChiSox had unraveled. That’s when (pitcher Waite) Hoyt
interrupted us and said, ‘Those bastards didn’t unravel. They were
struck by Five o’clock Lightning’,” and a nickname was born. Today if
games started at 3:30 p.m., they’d have to be called “Seven o’clock
Lightning.”
The cause of long games is
entirely due to pitchers taking too long to throw each pitch. If the
average game has 292 pitches, according to Baseball Reference, that
means that there is one pitch every 37 seconds throughout the entire
game. Of course that includes time to change innings and play batted
balls and such. But there is absolutely no reason for a pitcher to get
the ball from the catcher and take the 25 to 30 seconds before he throws
the next pitch today’s pitchers take. Baseball must institute a rule
that requires that each pitch be thrown within 15 seconds of receipt of
the ball by the pitcher back from the catcher (I would prefer 10 seconds
but let’s be flexible here). That would shorten the length of games back
to the 2 hours, 20-30 minutes they took back in the ‘50s. If the pitcher
does not throw the ball within the allotted 15 seconds, an automatic
ball would be called.
Of all the professional athletes
extant, baseball pitchers are the biggest prima donnas. They wander
around on the mound and rub the ball up and stare out into the outfield
and kick the dirt and take as much time as they want before they throw
the next pitch. The tempo of the game is entirely in the hands of the
pitcher and for baseball to become the game it was 50 years ago they
must be required to pitch at a quicker pace.
Of course there might be a more
diabolical reason why MLB doesn’t take serious action to shorten the
time it takes to play a game. That reason is money from concessions. The
shorter the game, the less concessions are sold. So why would any
avaricious businessman like the billionaire baseball owners
intentionally want to shorten the time his customer spends at the ball
park, even if it were for the good of the game?
|