DrungoHazewood

Especially when your manager calls you a little girl when you try to come out in the 8th with a torn ligament. Pacing was a very real thing. Matty wrote about it extensively in Pitching in a Pinch. Only rash kids and rank amateurs threw all out when the game wasn't on the line.

Memory is a weird thing. There are records of pitch counts from (IIRC) the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s and it shows roughly the same pitch count rates as today. The difference between, say, Mark Buehrle and Randy Johnson was something like a pitch an inning.

Every Giants' batter got a hit in route to a 6-1 win.

That's certainly possible. The TV contract for the English Premier League is $12 billion over three years, and the only commercial break is halftime.

The sun went down and the game was over, so the umps proactively told them to move it along. Also, trains didn't wait on baseball teams so those Sunday afternoon get-away games didn't linger on. On the last day of the 1919 season the Giants and Phillies played the first game of a doubleheader in 0:51.

Frobby already said that an average regular season commercial break is about two minutes. Cutting that in half is probably all you're going to be able to do, and that shaves off all of a half hour or so. That doesn't explain very much of the difference between the two hour game of a century ago and the Red Sox' version of a cricket 5-day test match.

How often does that happen? Once every two years? Three years? Actually... it's 74 times across MLB since 2015. Or about once every two years for an average team.

In 1920 an average game was about two hours. It wasn't uncommon to see a game played in 1:30. Today the Red Sox play games that average 3:25! Within the lifetime of my still-living grandfather there were doubleheaders played in about the same time it now takes to play nine innings. If it used to happen regularly, it can happen again. I used to play six-inning softball games in under an hour; I once played in a game after work that I left and then made it to kickoff of a DC United match at 7:30 and I live an hour and a half from DC. We're not inventing faster-than-light travel, we're trying to get baseball teams to play ball instead of messing around so much.

I think you make some good points, but also overstate your case when you say that " Players, coaches and umpires all understand these rules and agree with why they are in place". There's no disagreement from anyone involved in the sport at all about any aspects of the rule? That's hard to believe. Deception is part of the game. You hide signs, pitchers hide their grip on the pitch, infielders make phantom tags and catches when they don't have the ball, the hidden ball trick is legal, lefties intentionally make their windups and pickoff moves nearly identical, they step directly at 45 degrees while looking at the catcher and throwing to first. I don't like the infield fly rule. If you can let a popup drop, pick it, and turn two... good on you. I think there are other ways to incentivize base stealing, such as making all throws to bases that don't result in an out a ball on the batter. It's always been a little incongruous that a pitcher can only throw so many pitches before he's punished with a walk, but he can throw to first 25 times if he wants.

So we really could only cut 20-25 minutes off a game by getting rid of commercial time. I guess the pre-1960 games that were often 1:45 really were all about pace of play.

All T-ball games: 1. Whack the tee with the bat three times. 2. On 4th attempt ball dribbles out by the mound. 3. Entire defensive team collapses on ball. 4. After several minutes of a rugby scrum someone comes out of the pile with the ball. 5. That person throws the ball down the RF line, several minutes after the batter had already been standing on first, even though he started out running towards third. Repeat like 27 times, then get a juice box. Still better than six mid-inning pitching changes.

So what is it?

How long do you think it would take them to make a 7-inning game three hours? Like MurphDogg said, it's as much pace as length. With no constraints or incentives to keep the pace up I think seven innings would be doing the opposite. Now we've shaved 30 minutes off so we have 30 more minutes to play around with. Change more pitchers, stretch out the replays, add commercial times, we're still a little shorter than we used to be, right? Maybe we can have a tea break after the 5th...

I've mentioned this before, but I don't understand why shortening the commercial breaks would cost anything. Today's scenario is you sell advertisers three minutes of commercials for $X. Next year you sell advertisers 1 minute of commercials for that same $X. Less time, so the advertisers are competing for scarcer timeslots to get their product to your eyeballs. Analogous to smaller stadiums but same or higher revenues/higher prices due to scarcity. I guess one problem could be that MASN attracts some lower-end sponsors, and some of them just won't pay higher rates. I'd love to know how much money MASN makes off advertising. My not-very-informed guess is that it's far, far lower than they get from mandatory cable fees.

A 7:30 start time means finishing up at 10:30 or later. For me that means getting home after midnight. I get up for work at 5:30 or 6:00. I get grumpy with less than seven hours of sleep. Plus, even if you're closer to Baltimore you're not bringing kids to a weeknight game that ends at 10:30pm. You might occasionally if it's going to end at 9:00 or 9:30, and if it's a blowout you could sneak out a little earlier.

Let's see... in weekday traffic from my work OPACY is probably about 2 1/2 hours or so, maybe three. So I'd need to leave work at 3:30. Game's over at 9:30, 9:45, traffic much lighter on the way home, so there's a chance I'm walking in the door before midnight. Not too bad, around nine hours door-to-door. That's why I've been to one weekday night game in the last two decades.

What is the average commercial break? Three minutes? Seventeen breaks between half-innings, plus six mid-inning pitching changes... so 23 x 3 = 69 minutes. If you make it 45 seconds then you shave about 52 minutes off an average game. Let's do it! I'd even trade that for shirt sponsors, like Chico's Bail Bonds. Another option would be to eliminate lights. You can't play after the sun goes down. The addition of lights probably added 30-45 minutes to an average game, and took away almost all incentive to keep the pace up.

Tell the umps it will be noted on their performance appraisals and reflected in bonuses if they aren't calling automatic balls/strikes if the pitcher doesn't pitch in the allotted time, or the batter steps out. AND disallow mid-inning pitching changes. AND set the max number of pitchers on the roster to nine (phased in over the next four years).

I think you can be very specific and very simple. It's a balk if you stop your pitching motion towards the plate to throw to a base to attempt to catch a runner. The end. None of that other stuff about pitching without facing the batter, or dropping the ball, or whatever.

I'm going to wait and see how it works out. Maybe I've missed some nuance and managers will find a way to make this even more annoying and ludicrous than six mid-inning pitching changes. But I LOVE the fact that Major League Baseball is willing to try this. Hopefully this signals a greater willingness to address problems instead of rebranding them as features that "real" baseball fans should like.

When I'm driving to work one of my last turns is down a road that everyone else takes to the place I work. 90% of the cars turn there, so if I turn I'm stuck in a line of 12 cars going 40 mph for a few miles. But if I go straight, I can turn another 3/4ths of a mile down the road, go down a usually empty road, and end up at the back gate. I can go that whole 2 or 3 mile stretch at 10 mph over the speed limit with nobody in front of me. I'll often do this despite it being longer because the pace of driving isn't inhibited by 12 cars creeping along in a line. Freedom. That's the effect of this rule. I don't care if the game is only 20 seconds shorter (although every little bit helps), I no longer have to throw things at the TV because the Joe Girardi traffic jam has come out for his 5th mid-inning change of the night. The game is free to flow along.

Maybe Boston is hell. They have the longest games, and they play in a park designed in 1910 when people were 5' 5". You could extrapolate out a few centuries and the average Red Sox fan will be 6' 8" and they'll have to sit in their deadball era seats for seven hours a night. That might be worth keeping them around.

I'd like them to put together a committee to look through all the rules and ask "if we were starting over from scratch would we do this?" Things like the balk rule... it's now about two or three pages, much of which doesn't make any sense, but a reasonable person could rewrite it in a much more sensible, logical, understandable language in about 2-3 sentences. I think all rules, all laws, should regularly be revisited and people should seriously ask why we're doing this. Does it make any sense? Can we do it better?

That's like looking for broad changes in team runs allowed based on use of 40-inning LOOGYs in a 1450 inning season. You could argue that the effect is so small you might as well not use it.

Limits create strategy. If you're playing chess the strategy comes from the limits to where and how each piece can move. It would be a chaotic mess if all pieces moved like the queen. Making a pitcher pitch to three batters doesn't necessarily limit strategy. It changes the strategic options. It may open up options on offense. It makes the manager think ahead on which pitcher he wants to bring in. Much of the LOOGY machinations is more like automatic button pushing than hard-thought choices.