Are There Too Many Little Pauses In A MLB Game?

Baseball games in general have really slowed down. Some might even consider parts of the game boring and unnecessary. The point behind this debate is to discuss all the pauses. When we look at the mound visits, the time in between innings, and the stepping out of the batter’s box to adjust the gloves, it has all gotten out of hand. There are more pauses in baseball than there are in any sports and many of them just seem unnecessary. Does a batter really have to adjust his gloves after every pitch? I really doubt his gloves, which are already tight to the skin, shifted at all while he was standing there. Does a mound visit really need to take 10 minutes to try and build a pitcher’s confidence? If someone needs this much talking to, then he really needs to be pulled or the coach needs to do a better job. I work in a profession where I am constantly talking to my employees about how they can improve and help out the next customer better than they did the last customer. Most of my conversations are 5 minutes at most and are far more complex than “quit nibbling at the strike zone and go after this guy.” Baseball right now is struggling for an audience. We constantly see games where there is maybe 10,000 in attendance and the stadiums seem empty. A good way to attract more people would be to speed up the game and get the action going more. We constantly see the cameras show a little kid sleeping at the game, yet I never see that at a football or hockey game. There are easily way too many pauses in baseball.

Baseball has always had a lot of pauses. The average baseball game is right around 3 hours and 15 minutes, which is about the same amount of time as your average NFL, NBA, & NHL games. All 4 sports seem to have their game time lengths right around the same mark. Major League Baseball even tried to shorten the length of their games by setting a time length goal of 2 hours and 45 minutes in 2004. Of course this goal has rarely been reached, but if the game has a lot of runs and is exciting then why would you want it to end? As for the little pauses, they have specific meaning. Walking up to the plate and hitting a 90 MPH fastball isn’t easy. So it might take stepping out of the box and going through a routine to get your mind right. It also might take a pitcher who is struggling a few minutes to calm down and understand that maybe he is over throwing everything. They also discuss defensive positioning and future batters in those mound visits. Baseball isn’t like all the other sports where they have time outs to discuss how to attack a particular player or how to handle a specific situation. If there is a man on third and Pujols is up, you probably pitch to him differently than if the bases were empty. When would you discuss this exactly? The score of the game dictates a lot as well. There has also been studies done that show if you remove a lot of the little nuances and pauses, the game only speeds up by about 15 minutes. So overall the pauses are needed and really don’t affect the game in the long run.