Baseball games: getting longer?

ESPN's Bill Simmons (aka The Sports Guy) recently suggested that the primary cause of dwindling interest in Red Sox games by fans is that baseball games these days are too long. "It's not that fun to spend 30-45 minutes driving to a game, paying for parking, parking, waiting in line to get in, finding your seat ... and then, spend the next three-plus hours watching people play baseball", he says. But this is a relatively new phenomenon: are the games really any longer today than they used to be?

Inspired by the column and having recently learned about the power of R's ggplot2 package to visualize data, R user (and baseball fan) Ryan Elmore decided to find out. He wrote code to scrape from the Web data on the lengths of all MLB games since 1970, and then created some lovely visualizations using ggplot 2 and R. For example, here's a scatterplot of the lengths of games from all teams over time, with a smooth trend indicating a clear lengthening of the game, at least through the turn of the century:

The peak average game length comes during the "Steroids Era" of Baseball, which Ryan delineates on the chart with the dashed red lines. Beyond that peak, there appears to be a slow but steady decline in the length of the games (although still more than 20 minutes longer than games in the 70's). So how does this explain the disaffectation of Red Sox fans suggested by The Sports Guy? Ryan takes it one step further, and break out Red Sox games separately:

So it does seem that Boston games are indeed getting longer, lending credence to the Sports Guy's claim. However: I'm no baseball expert, but I'm pretty sure there have been more than 3 Red Sox games since 2004, and the apparent increase may just be a fluke. Given that Ryan has posted his code in R to create the chart, maybe someone with access to more data can verify the result? If you do, let us know in the comments. 

The Log Cabin: Are MLB games getting longer?

Comments

[Otto]

Very interesting. I just have one critique of the plot: it would be nice to have the y-axis extend to zero. That way we could put the change in perspective.

[GB]

By comparison with cricket the times aren't that long. Play in one day cricket lasts about 7 hours, in two sessions of about 3.5 hours each. Test cricket goes for five days, with six hours play each day, in three two-hour sessions.

(However, some games can be substantially shorter in each case)

The shortest form of top-level cricket, Twenty-20, typically lasts two and a half to three hours - about as long as a baseball game.

[Matt]

I disagree with both posts. Having zero on the access wouldn't contribute anything, the 'change' being sort/questioned isn't do with the game doubling in length, I doubt the thought behind the comment was that the 'games are longer' meant they were now 3 hours compared to 1, so I believe the scale shown is appropriate here, for a 'fine grain' look at the change. And cricket has about as much relevance in this conversation as fishing or space travel. It isn't baseball vs the world >_<

I have slightly less than 0 interest in baseball and I'd still be really keen to see this applied to a larger dataset, especially more than 3 games from the team of interest :) Great stuff

[Ryan]

@Matt - This is a summarization of a really large data set. It the median length of games over the entire season (162 games) for each team (25 teams or so) for 30 seasons.

[lee]

Maybe using 'jitter' would show the dataset as being larger.

[Peter Hyatt]

This is a fascinating statistic which allows for interpretation as to why.

I contend that the explosion of "Sportscenter" and television coverage, along with salaries and narcissism all conspired together to slow the game down.

"Old school" pitchers like RA Dickey work fast.

Today, with 50,000 fans and major close up TV cameras, players are still not satisfied with the attention levels so they wear jewelry and even dye their hair like my mom used to in the '70's...anything for more attention.
Tom Seaver worked fast. Mike Piazza with his changing hair styles, made us wait, pitch after pitch, calling time out, enjoying the attention of the camera.