How Our Pastime Passes Time

Even with Harvard’s sudden preponderance of Red Sox fans, turnout in campus JCRs was surprisingly lackluster for this year’s baseball playoffs. But, really, who has time to watch a whole baseball game nowadays? Especially as national networks take over for playoff broadcasts, games are getting so long that they rarely end on the same day they began. Major League Baseball should be happy that its postseason can inspire solidarity among even casual observers (the cons of the “bandwagon” aside). But when fandom requires such a time commitment, it scares all but the truly obsessed away from bonding over a game.

Most people (and TV networks) budget three hours for a baseball game. Really, though, this is far longer than the baseball gods ever intended. It is twice as long as a normal game was in the early 20th century. In 1920, a 26-inning game—that’s almost three normal games in a row—ended after three hours and 50 minutes. Even by 1943, the American League average game length was still just one hour, 58 minutes.

The modern era is setting records in the other direction. The longest regulation game in history was played in 2006 between the Red Sox and New York Yankees. It lasted four hours and 45 minutes. And the same two teams fell just two minutes short of that record in another game this season. The mark they broke (4:27) was set in 2001. With over 100 years of baseball history, that’s an awful lot of distinction for just this decade.

Fans can feel the difference. After games, those who have made it to the end groan at the late hour. It’s a shame that students should have to choose between an English paper and the World Series. For those, God forbid, who have class or work in the morning, a healthy sleep cycle is also at stake.

The problem peaks in the playoffs—as anyone who sat through the World Series can painfully attest. TBS, one of the networks covering the games, even arranged to have them spread out at 3:30 intervals, anticipating that they would run long. Of course, the fact that networks are now dictating start times unmasks the power to which baseball has sacrificed efficient games: television.

As with the Superbowl, national networks now view baseball’s postseason as a goldmine for advertisement revenue. Between every half-inning and during every pitching change, there is now a commercial break of at least a few minutes. When there is a lot of money to be made (as in October), that means squeezing in, say, one extra minute of ads per break. The problem is that this squeezes at least 20 extra minutes into the baseball game.

And when games drag on, viewers tune out, explaining why so many Americans are turned off by their national pastime. In the end, this will be profitable neither for Major League Baseball nor for the networks that are no longer being watched. More personally, it makes the sport seem unconcerned with welcoming baseball newcomers.

For the sake of the fans, baseball should stop kowtowing to the media. Teams should simply start playing, refuse to wait for unreasonable commercial breaks, and remain conscious of the game’s pace. A little courtesy to us—veterans and rookie fans alike—would go a long way.



Nathaniel S. Rakich ’10, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Cabot House.