Darkside wrote:
Juice's Lecture Notes wrote:
Don Tiny wrote:
How much time does that really remove from a given game? Virtually none. You might shave 10-15 minutes total over an entire season.
There were 932 intentional walks in all of MLB last year. With 30 teams playing roughly 162 games a year (there were 4 teams last year with only 161, hence "roughly"), that makes for 2430 actual games played in a season, give or take a few. That results in an average of .38 intentional walks per game. If we assume that an intentional walk takes 1 minute (it probably doesn't, but this simplifies the math), that is an expected reduction of .38 minutes, or about 23 seconds per game, for a total of 55,890 seconds over a season, or about 15.5 hours. To put that into perspective, the average MLB game length is 2 hours and 56 minutes, or 2.93 hours, that makes for a season's worth of games running about 7200 hours. Cutting 15.5 hours is a reduction of total run-time of 0.2%.
Way to shit up a nice thread.
Fucking maths.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuzBzASzOR4Here's Kyle Schwarber walking up to 'Thuggish Ruggish Bone'. Depending on when you start the clock, you'll see that it takes anywhere from 35 to 39 seconds for him to approach the plate and get ready to see the first pitch--I timed it up until the pitcher broke his set position, and got 37 seconds. For the sake of argument, let's assume that most batter walk-ups take about that long, and for the ease of math let's be incredibly favorable and say the average is 30 seconds (from an out in a progressing inning until the first pitch of the next plate appearance).
There were 184,580 plate appearances in 2016 by all MLB teams, most of which required a "walk-up". If we don't count the 43,420 PA's to lead off an inning last year (they require a "walk-up" still, but that is rolled into the warmup of the inning itself, so let's again be generous and not count that time), we have 141,160 instances of a player needing to make his way from the dugout to the plate after an out. If the average of that time is 30 seconds, that means 2016 featured 4,234,800 seconds (1176 hours, roughly) of "walk-up" time. That accounts for 16.3% of the total time we would expect an MLB season to take up (7200 hours, based on a 2 hours, 56 minutes average runtime per game).
If the MLB were to reduce that "walk-up" time by just 40%--from 30 to 18 seconds--we could expect the average game time to be reduced by almost 10%, from 2 hours, 56 minutes to 2 hours, 38 minutes, substantially closer to the vaunted "two and a half hour" mark. Now let's consider that the original "walk-up" average of 30 seconds was chosen for ease of computation, and given the evidence it is incredibly likely that the real amount of time an average player spends walking up to the plate and getting set between outs is closer to 40 seconds than it is 30, a 40% reduction in that time becomes all the more powerful, likely getting the average game time well below 2.5 hours. This is all without limiting mound visits, pitching changes, or instituting a pitch-clock league-wide, the MLB could reduce game length by 10% simply by asking (making) batters to get to the plate a little faster.