Last night the St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants played an incredible baseball game. There were big hits, huge strikeouts and some of the most heads-up baseball I’ve seen in a long time (see Matt Duffy running the bases). A few minutes before midnight, after the Giants tied the game in the 9th inning, Cardinals second baseman Kolten Wong launched a game winning home run into the right field stands.
It was another incredible moment in a postseason that’s been chock-full of them.
Despite these amazing games, many have taken to social media to voice their frustration with the timing of Major League Baseball’s playoff calendar. With games ending at or after midnight, it’s conceivable that while adult baseball fans are soaking in the intensity of the playoffs, kids are asleep and have to rely on SportsCenter during breakfast the next morning to see what happened.
What’s fascinating is that this isn’t a new occurrence. Playoff baseball games have always started around 8:00 PM. In 1986, the National League Championship Series featuring the Mets and the Astros, had games starting all over the place. Game one in Houston started at 7:30, ending at 10:26 PM. Game three, back in New York, started at 12:20 PM and ended in the middle of the afternoon (3:15 PM). Game four, also in New York, started at 8:20 PM, which is later than most of the East Coast games this year have started. That game ended at 10:43 PM.
As you can see, the start times for playoff games haven’t changed all that much. What has changed is the length of the games. Major League Baseball wants to hold onto the “prime time” slot for the cable networks but with the games getting longer and longer, it’s becoming a detriment to baseballs most important demographic. Kids under the age of 15. These are the future players, consumers and fans of baseball and they are being alienated.
The key change for baseball of course is the length of games. By 2000, the last time the Mets won the National League Championship, games were already getting quite long. Game two against the Cardinals in 2000 lasted almost four hours. This year, games lasted an average of about 3 hours, up over 30 minutes compared to 30 years ago according to The New York Times.
This is the challenge for baseball. How do you take a sport that naturally takes a long time to play and make it easy to watch for kids? The answer is simple and it has nothing to do with making the games shorter. It’s just about sliding the start times up. Games are always going to run late, especially when you have competition at the level it’s been at in recent years. But moving the start times up to 7:00 PM instead of 8:00 PM means that games are ending on this side of midnight.
Rob Manfred is going to spend the entire offseason figuring out ways to speed up baseball. While this is a noble cause, I’ll be the first to say that I don’t want or need baseball to be faster. Playoff baseball is exciting in a way that no writer could ever script into a movie. There’s drama that roughly three hours does justice for. I don’t need baseball to be faster. I just need the games to start earlier so that kids of all ages (and sleepy adults of all ages) can begin to enjoy moments like Wong’s game winner last night each and every night of October.
