Release Points: Picking Up the Pace

Early consensus seems to be that the “pace of play” rule changes introduced this year have been both effective at reducing length and minimally invasive to the game itself. After the first week of the season, games were finishing eight minutes quicker than in the same period last year. Since then, there doesn’t seem to have been a lot of interest in the topic. Major League Baseball announced its contentment with the results to such a degree that the fines for batter’s box rule violators were never implemented. As of May 19th, nine-inning games are nine minutes shorter than they were last year. That’s a pretty noticeable difference!

But is the goal supposed to be shorter games in and of themselves, or faster play? Are we getting shorter games the way the rules were designed to achieve that goal? Shorter times might be related to either one of the rule changes imposed this year—no stepping out of the batter’s box, and shorter between-inning breaks—but the implications for future discussion on the issue might be closely tied to which rule(s) are responsible.

Commissioner Rob Manfred has struck a cautious, laissez-faire tone in nudging baseball games back under the three-hour line. He said explicitly in spring training that the rule changes were not designed to alter in-game activity: “I’m not as concerned with that as I am about the flow of the game. Taking out unnecessary breaks in the action is really what our focus is going forward.” It would be especially prudent, in light of that vision, to check where the time gains are coming from.

It might not be feasible to narrow down exactly what is causing shorter game times this year, but there are a few ways we can try to point to, broadly, whether in-game activity has been significantly responsible. The first of these is the time between pitches in an at-bat, which can be measured by using the timestamps of each individual pitch as recorded by PITCHf/x.

Below is a table comparing the time between pitches within at-bats under a few conditions.

Time between pitches is actually up across the board this year. The exact increase varies depending on the circumstance, but it shows up everywhere. In fact, the average time between pitches is up about 7 percent overall just since the 2011 season. That 1.4-second gap between 2011 and 2015, times 300 pitches per game, adds seven minutes to each game. It’s possible that the tempo of pitcher activity was one of the reasons for the interest in speeding up games, but it sure does not seem to have been affected by the mandate for hitters to stay in the batter’s box between pitches. For whatever reason, the trend of having more time between pitches is continuing. The batter’s box rule doesn’t seem to be the reason for the shorter game durations this year.

Maybe there are other in-game factors, such as the frequency of events that add game time, that could explain the drop in game times. Fewer plate appearances per inning (presumably as a result of fewer hits and walks per inning) or fewer pitches per plate appearance would also cut down the game’s length.

Contrary to the general trend of longer games until this year, plate appearances per inning has slowly decreased and then flattened out this year. (This corresponds, as one would expect, to fewer baserunners per inning, as the league-wide WHIP trend confirms.) It’s interesting that the pitches per plate appearance is down this year after staying in a very narrow band since 2010. Might this be a major source of game savings? Probably not. The difference in pitches per plate appearance multiplied by the time per pitch on average multiplied by plate appearances per game results in a savings of … 54 seconds per game. The league-wide drop in pitches per plate appearance might itself become an interesting topic, but it seems to be only a minor contributor to the drop in game time.

In-game activity—at least as I’ve been able to measure it—seems to be only marginally responsible for the quicker pace of games this year. The data above doesn’t prove, but does strongly suggest, that the biggest reason for the speed-up is the shortened break between innings. In fact, it’s not altogether clear that the batter’s box rule has had much of an impact, as the actual time between pitches has gone up this year even after the rule change. Staying true to Commissioner Manfred’s intent to quicken games without interfering with game-play itself, perhaps MLB will decide that the batter’s box rule is not needed at all, and that the game can be played exactly as it was in previous years—except for the between-inning breaks—and still get fans home a few minutes earlier each night.