We aim to find out, and we’ll go inning-by-inning.
Why are modern baseball games so much longer? Is it because of extra commercials? Batters fidgeting with their batting gloves? On-field delays? Slow home-run trots? It has to be the commercials, right? The MLB.tv game from 2014 didn’t have the original commercials, but it did have the same timing of the original commercial breaks. Even though the best source for vintage baseball games was eliminated by copyright ninjas, I still found a full game from 1984 with commercials on YouTube. Just because the games are nearly identical, that doesn’t mean this is an unimpeachable answer as to why baseball games are longer.īut as many of the variables were eliminated as possible. No two games are ever the same, of course, with different hiccups and quirks mixed between the balls and strikes. This isn’t a perfect, peer-reviewed experiment.
