The Longest Game

Tonight, the Tampa Bay Rays take on the Philadelphia Phillies in the third game of the World Series. All signs point to a long, tightly fought series between two fantastic teams, and yet I'm having trouble bringing myself to actually watch.

Now I love baseball. I listened to most of the Jays games this year using MLB's Gameday Radio service - even when the Jays were out of contention for a playoff spot. And then in contention. And then back out of contention.

My disinterest is not an indictment of the teams. Just because there are no incredibly obvious story lines (curses to break, vendettas, etc.) does not mean that there is no reason to watch. High quality baseball is certainly enough for me.

But playoff baseball can be incredibly frustrating for a number of reasons, with my biggest complaint being that the games take so much longer than they do in the regular season.

Just to illustrate this point, consider that in the years 2006 and 2007, the average regular season game took approximately 172 and 175 minutes respectively (the data is based on game logs from Retrosheet.org). For the 29 games in the current playoffs, the average game length has been 204 minutes long. Even when I remove the two extra-inning games which the Red Sox played - each of which took over 5 hours despite the fact that the games were only 11 and 12 innings long - the average game length is still 195 minutes for a game. While I have no problem watching extra baseball, I do have a problem with having the same amount of baseball take extra time.

Note, these numbers come with some caveats. Twenty-nine games is a small sample size. Unfortunately, I currently can't find easy-to-manipulate playoff game logs and I am not about to look over hundreds of individual game pages on baseball-reference.com (where the current info is from). Another aspect that may be skewing the results, is that certain teams in the playoffs, such as the Red Sox, are also known for having longer games. However, this effect seems to be exacerbated in the playoffs.

Having the pace of a sport decrease is not necessarily inherently evil, but I think it is problematic for baseball. Keep in mind, this is a sport which is played almost every day. With the World Series games starting at 8pm EST, it can be difficult to become personally invested in a series. Not only is an incredible time commitment required of anyone who wants to enjoy as much of a series as possible (almost 3 and a half hours a day), but people also have to work in the morning. Not to mention Mountain Time folk who enjoy listening to games during dinner, and still like having time to accomplish things afterwards (5 o'clock games are awesome).

One of the causes of this problem is very obvious - specifically, the increased length of between-inning commercials that the game is forced to work around. However, there is probably more to the story than that. For example, managers may be making more pitching changes, or pitchers might be slowing down since they are often asked to pitch more frequently in the playoffs. I'll leave the hypothesizing to another post and instead just hope that MLB tries to address the problem.