This is just about the craziest Red Sox-Yankees stat we've seen in a long, long time
BOSTON -- The Red Sox and Yankees played over the weekend. If you blinked, you might've missed it.
OK, that's hyperbole. But if you tuned in to watch the latest chapter of this historic rivalry, you couldn't help but notice that it was, quite literally, a whole new ballgame in the pitch clock era. Known for having marathon-type interminable slogs every time they meet, this weekend's series was brief. It was downright laconic out there. 'Twas a compendious series on the whole. (Shall I use more words from the Thesaurus, or has the point been made?)
On Friday night, in the first meeting of the year between the two teams, the Red Sox and Yankees completed their work in two hours and 28 minutes.
On Saturday night, the game was one minute longer, at 2:29.
And on Sunday night -- this is the real kicker -- even with an extra inning being played, the Red Sox and Yankees completed their game in two hours and 51 minutes.
Surely, fans don't need to be reminded that when the Red Sox and Yankees used to play on ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball, the first pitch would come just after 8 p.m., and you'd be lucky if the last pitch didn't come after midnight. That's just the way it was.
But this weekend's series is evidence that yes, life is different in the day and age of a pitch clock. Even for the two teams for which that type of impact didn't seem possible.
The average game time in this weekend's series was two hours and 36 minutes.
A mid-July series at Yankee Stadium last year had an average game time of three hours and 33 minutes. One of those games did go to 11 innings, but the two nine-inning games were 3:09 and 3:32.
In the opening series of the year last season, the Red Sox and Yankees averaged game times of 3:31. That did include another 11-inning game, but it concluded with an absolute whopper on Sunday Night Baseball: Three hours and 40 minutes of baseball, in a game where only seven combined runs were scored.
An early-July series at Fenway included four games, one of which went to a 10th inning. The average game time was three hours and 29 minutes, with the second game clocking in at a titanic three hours and 51 minutes. For comparison's sake, that 10-inning game last year (during which five combined runs were scored in the 10th inning) took 3:38 to complete. This year's 10-inning affair took 2:51 to complete.
All of that is to say that while we all saw the effects of the pitch clock during spring training and through the first two months of the year, the new rules faced their stiffest test possible in the form of a Red Sox-Yankees series. And indeed, we can confirm that a new era has dawned in Major League Baseball.
It would be a joke to suggest that Theo Epstein deserves serious consideration for a Nobel Peace Prize for this accomplishment. But also ... would it?