HOUSTON — The focus in this postseason — and this World Series — should be on Freddie Freeman and Carlos Correa, on the unlikely Atlanta Braves and the powerhouse Houston Astros. With the Astros’ 7-2 victory in Game 2 on Wednesday night at Minute Maid Park, the series is tied at a game apiece as it heads to Atlanta. There is almost certainly compelling baseball to come, and there is time to talk about it.
Plenty. Of. Time.
Show of hands: How many stayed up to watch the conclusion of both Games 1 and 2? For Tuesday’s series opener, that would have meant finally flipping off the television at 12:17 a.m. Eastern time Wednesday, a full 4 hours 6 minutes after the first pitch. For Game 2, that was tightened to 3:11. Enjoy those extra Z’s.
The games are too long. Yes, they’re too slow, and they start too late. But they’re too long.
For those of us who have waked on the couch on more than an occasional October night, that feels true, if only anecdotally. But the math backs it up: Through Game 1 of the World Series, the 31 nine-inning games in this postseason averaged 3:37.
According to data provided by Major League Baseball, that was not only a full half an hour longer than the seemingly interminable regular season average of 3:10 but up from the postseason average of 3:32 last October. The range in the postseason over the past decade has generally been from a low of 3:10 and change to a high of 3:32 and change — until this year.
You still awake?
This matters. It matters for the obvious, evergreen discussion surrounding how baseball can engage younger fans if those younger fans can’t stay up late enough to see the sport’s most important games. It also matters in personal decision-making on how you spend your time. It’s a lot easier to commit to investing in the first at-bat of a game if you have a good idea you will be comfortably awake to see the final out.
Here’s a random data point: Tuesday’s first pitch was thrown at 7:11 p.m. Central time. At 8:44 p.m., the Astros recorded the last out — of the third inning. Here’s another random data point: Of those 31 nine-inning games this postseason, five came in under the regular season average of 3:10 — and eight lasted more than four hours.
Now, for a bit of self-awareness: This can read as a cranky, old-man complaint. It’s scientifically proved that staying up past midnight, night after night after night, can cause crankiness. My birth certificate shows I’m old. I get it. Guilty.
But I also counter such accusations with the following: Show me the 10-year-old who’s clamoring for a four-hour game. When the main sentiment in the postseason isn’t “I hope this game never ends” but rather “When will it finally be over?” then Houston, we have a problem.
Plus, this isn’t a screed as much as a search for solutions. And there are some, which we will get to.
Astros Manager Dusty Baker is 72, and he probably should be having a warm glass of milk when the late innings of these postseason games are trudging on. Baker played in 2,039 regular season games, plus 40 more in the postseason. Could he have played in a nine-inning game that lasted four hours?
“I don’t think so,” Baker responded — and quickly because he knew he hadn’t.
Indeed, Baker’s playing career spanned from 1968 to 1986. In that time, the longest nine-inning postseason game, according to the essential website baseball-reference.com, lasted 3:48. A grand total of four postseason games took as long as 3½ hours.
This October alone, Baker has managed six nine-inning games that took four hours to complete.
“Sometimes it feels slow,” Baker said. “But commercial time pays the bills, and that’s the reality of it all. You can cut down the commercial time, and then you got to cut down on the amount of money that’s passed around.”
Well, yes and no. The break between innings — Baker’s “commercial time” — is 2 minutes 25 seconds during the regular season, 2:55 in the postseason. So there are nine extra minutes built into postseason games — which isn’t insignificant but doesn’t account for the half-hour gap between this year’s regular season and playoffs.
Still, there’s a good notion that MLB could shorten games — in October and over the course of the summer — by tightening the time between innings to, say, a minute and running ads in the broadcast alongside the first minute or so of action. There are ways to both pay the bills and rein in the length of game, and MLB is working on them.
“The length of the games is a major concern,” said Bob DuPuy, MLB’s president and chief operating officer. “It’s a problem, and it’s one we have to address.”
So … wait a minute. DuPuy hasn’t worked at MLB since 2010.
(Checks notes.)
Oh, that quote is from a story I wrote during the postseason — of 2007.
“There are things you can do to move the game along,” DuPuy said then. “This is going to be a priority of the commissioner’s office in the offseason.”
And yet, 14 years later, here we are, yawning and blinking our eyes clear.
In an effort to wake my brain, I texted a smattering of executives from various sides of the game Wednesday — club officials, major league officials, agents — asking for tweaks that might have some impact. One suggested seven-inning games, which feels … radical. Another suggested regular season series with two seven-inning games and a nine-inning matchup to finish it on, say, Sunday afternoon. One asked for both a deadened baseball and rosters limited to 12 pitchers — which I wholeheartedly endorse because, if there are fewer pitchers to use, each pitcher has to do more and there can’t be as many game-stalling switches.
One official, asked for three tweaks that would help, responded with the following: “1. Pitch timer. 2. Pitch timer. 3. Pitch timer.”
This, too, makes sense. Game 2 moved noticeably more quickly because the starting pitchers — Houston’s José Urquidy and Atlanta’s Max Fried — essentially receive the ball, get set and throw.
But not enough pitchers do, and all of baseball knows it. In the postseason, there are reasons for pitchers to slow the game down. The pressure is amplified. The heart needs calming. Each pitch matters. Inhale. Exhale. More time is needed.
Baseball, though, now has data — encouraging data — that limiting the time between pitches not only shortens the game significantly but also has ancillary benefits. This past summer, MLB experimented with a 15-second pitch clock in the eight-team Low Class A West league. The impact was immediate and obvious. Games were 21 minutes shorter than at the same level in 2019. (Minor league seasons were lost to the pandemic in 2020.) Plus, strikeouts went down and offense went up — and not just homers but balls in play, a crucial element of action that MLB is losing as pitchers and organizations optimize velocity.
Anyhow, the World Series is tied. Game 3 isn’t till Friday night. Rest up. We know you will need it.
