[I believe this is the last time I’ll write about the pitch clock and its effects. After this, the clock will be treated in this newsletter as normal life.]
A strange thing has been happening this season, where I’ll go to turn on a baseball game and there just won’t be one. The 1 p.m. Pacific games will all be over before the 7 p.m. Eastern games have begun. Or the last West Coast night game will be over at, like, 8:47. In fact, excluding Sundays and Opening Day, here are the finish times (PT) for every day of the season so far:
4/15: 9:29 p.m.
4/14: 10:09
4/13: 9:31
4/12: 9:55
4/11: 9:23
4/10: 9:18
4/8: 8:47
4/7: 9:11
4/6: 9:53
4/5: 6:57
4/4: 9:35
4/3: 9:59
4/2: 8:44
3/31: 10:15
Only two games past 10 p.m.! I’m not complaining. I’m just filing one slightly disappointed awww at the recession of any-game-’ll-do ball. Finitude is a beast.
We’ve gone back in time a little bit, to a time when a baseball fan might occasionally end up stuck on an exercise bike with nothing but memories of baseball games already over. But going back in time a little bit was the explicit pitch of this year’s rules changes. (“Field like Ozzie, run like Rickey!”) Which got me wondering: When it comes to pace, which year of baseball is this, exactly? This is an attempt to answer that question by considering two plausible answers:
1. We’ve gone back to 1983’s pace. This year was chosen because the average nine-inning game this year is two hours and 37 minutes; in 1983, it was two hours and 36 minutes. That is a great reason to choose 1983.
2. We’ve gone back to 1936’s pace. This year was chosen for no other reason than that it was the earliest I could find a complete, regular-season radio broadcast of a major-league baseball game. That is a silly reason to choose 1936. Surprisingly, this answer turns out to be more correct.
The broadcast I listened to was the first game of a doubleheader between the Red Sox and White Sox on Aug. 2, 1936. The White Sox won 9-1. I listened to that game over the weekend, curious about how its pace would feel to me, a fan now accustomed to modern pitch clock ball. I had a stopwatch and a spreadsheet.
Then, on Sunday morning, I watched the Rays and Blue Jays, again w/ stopwatch & spreadsheet. Conveniently, the final score of that game turned out to be 8-1, and featured exactly one more batter than the 1936 game, which made comparisons pretty simple and quite convincing:
Average time per pitch with bases empty (not counting first pitch to new batters)
1936: 17.6 seconds
2023: 17.8 seconds
Average time per pitch with runners on base
1936: 20.4 seconds
2023: 22.4 seconds
Average time between batters (not counting new innings)
1936: 41.4 seconds
2023: 40.3 seconds
So, all practically the same.
Now, don’t get it twisted. These games were very different. The old one took one hour and 56 minutes. The new one took two hours and 40 minutes, despite being almost identically “paced.” Why so?
It took 11 extra minutes because the time between innings is longer. In 1936, there were no commercial breaks, and the pitcher would just start pitching when he was ready and the batter was in the box. The standard 2023 innings break is about 40 seconds longer than the 1936 average.
It took 6 extra minutes more because of pitching changes. A pitching change mid-inning takes almost three minutes. A pitching change at the start of an inning adds about 30 or 40 seconds. There were an average of 1.8 pitching changes per game in 1936, compared to 6.6 pitching changes per game today.
And the big one:
It took 27 extra minutes because so many more pitches were thrown. The Rays and Blue Jays sent up one more batter than the White Sox and Red Sox did, but they threw 80 more pitches. In this case, most of those extra pitches were with the bases empty, which pace more quickly, so the game still hustled. But that’s how an almost identical game took an extra 44 minutes.
There were also old-timey ways that the old-timey game was delayed: Pitchers’ windups were apparently so drawn out in 1936 that batters would sometimes call timeout in the middle of the windup. Pitchers had to keep stopping to do their own groundskeeping on the old pitching mounds; that was definitely a thing. At one point the start of an inning was briefly delayed by shortstop Joe Cronin and second baseman John Kroner doing what was described by the broadcaster as a “juggling act” before returning to the ball to the pitcher. I have no idea. The home-plate ump would regularly ask to see the ball, to examine it and see if it was too scuffed up to keep using. Pauses to retrieve foul balls when possible. Once an usher and a fan seemed to be fighting over a foul.
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