Baseball Has A Pace Of Play Problem, But Does It Really Want To Shorten Games?
By Matt Dolloff, CBS Boston
BOSTON (CBS) -- The late, hilarious George Carlin had an iconic routine called "Baseball & Football" that evolved over countless retellings. One of the enduring passages of the bit is that while football is "rigidly timed" and "will end, even if we have to go to sudden death," in baseball there's no time limit. "We don't know when it's going to end! We might even have EXTRA innings!"
An intriguing concept - in the previous century, when people had more patience. In today's increasingly fast-paced world, baseball's lack of time restraints and plodding pace is becoming less of a singularly charming quirk and more like a quaint nod to yesteryear. According to ESPN senior baseball writer Jayson Stark, the average length of a nine-inning game so far in 2016 is up to three hours and 26 seconds, which is up about seven minutes from the same point last season. The average length of a game in 2015 grew to about two hours and 56 minutes by the end of the season.
Every time a game crosses the three-hour mark - continually disrupted by replays, mound visits, and insufferable dawdling by pitchers and batters eager to spit, scuff the ball, adjust their caps, adjust their crotch areas - Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred grows more wary of his sport's growing pacing issue.
Manfred told ESPN that last season, baseball focused mainly on the players when it came to speeding up games. "We feel like we've lost a little focus," he said. "So we're doing a variety of things to try to get that focus back."
Among the "focus" on players was MLB's "personal phone calls" to players who repeatedly violate the "rules" regarding pace of play - which only extend, for the most part, to rules like No. 8.04, which "discourages unnecessary delays by the pitcher." It's fair to question how much team execs really want to reduce the length of games as they are today when the actual rules are worded that way. Manfred may genuinely want to reduce game times, but he's also at the mercy of the owners. Cutting games down to under three hours, after all, removes precious time that ballparks would have to reap profits.
Revenue, by the way, is higher than ever for the sport, despite a perceived decline in popularity. MLB reported gross revenues of about $9.5 billion in 2015, the 13th straight year of record growth for baseball. Shorter games - and, by extension, less time spent by fans slinging cash - would inevitably cut into those numbers. Based on the regulations currently in place, and Manfred's emphasis on pace of play, indicates that owners at the major league level are happy to make games move faster - just not at the expense of time.
Baseball has experimented in recent years with pitch clocks at the minor league level, implementing them in 2014 at Salt River Field near Scottsdale, Arizona, home of the Salt River Rafters of the Arizona Fall League. The average length of AFL games in that stadium decreased by about ten minutes year-over-year. They also instituted time limits for between-inning breaks, pitching changes, and "time out" calls, reinforced by the threats of automatic ball/strike calls.
A reduction by ten minutes, which would likely be even longer at the major league level, would be a welcome change for baseball fans who are growing more exasperated with the tedium of unnecessarily long, slow games that at times cling to your attention by mere threads. Putting a clock on players, especially pitchers, would remove their propensity to needlessly take upwards of a full minute between pitches when about 20 seconds would suffice. A brisker pace would only help the overall product of baseball, but if the owners are that stubborn about keeping the games at three-plus hours, any extra time created by a faster pace would probably become commercial time.
Manfred is attempting to disconnect the ideas of "time" and "pacing." For whatever reason, he feels the two do not necessarily affect each other, even though they mostly do. In pretty much any activity, a slower pace means a longer length of time. It would be impossible for baseball to speed up the pacing of games without also diminishing game times ... unless they're thinking about more radical rule changes. Maybe they'll add an inning or two...
Manfred faces an unfortunate quandary. He certainly needs to keep his owners pleased and the cash flowing; making games shorter across the board is not likely to do that. Making games faster, however, would be a benefit to everybody involved.
If Manfred truly seeks to improve the pacing without shortening the games, which he ostensibly does want, what exactly does he want to do? Until the major leagues get serious about timing their games more rigidly, his intentions and overall motivation to improve his product should continue to invite scrutiny.
Matt Dolloff is a writer for CBSBostonSports.com. His opinions do not necessarily reflect that of CBS or 98.5 The Sports Hub. Have a news tip or comment for Matt? Follow him on Twitter @mattdolloff and email him at mdolloff@985thesportshub.com.