Baseball durations after the pitch clock
Key Takeaways
- The author analyzed MLB regular season game durations through the 2024 season, fulfilling a long-delayed promise.
- The introduction of the pitch clock in 2023 caused a 'huge dropoff' in game duration, marking it as a significant success.
- Current game lengths are comparable to those observed in the early 1980s, effectively removing decades of excess time.
- The data processing involved downloading Retrosheet logs, cleaning them using `dos2unix`, concatenating them, and using Python/Pandas to calculate yearly quartiles.
- The author plans to update the analysis once the 2025 game logs from Retrosheet are published.
After a delay, the author presents an analysis of Major League Baseball regular season game durations through the 2024 season, prompted by a recent discussion about Apple's Sports app. The analysis relies on historical game logs downloaded and processed from Retrosheet using Python and Pandas to calculate yearly median durations and interquartile ranges. The resulting data clearly demonstrates a substantial decrease in game length starting in 2023, which the author confidently credits to the implementation of the pitch clock. While game times continued to slightly decrease in 2024, this change fell within normal year-to-year variation, meaning the pitch clock achieved the primary goal of cutting about four decades of excess time from the game. The author notes this was accomplished without reducing the number of commercials, and plans to update the analysis once the 2025 data becomes available.
