Jan. 19--America's favorite pastime is taking way too much time, many people believe.
The average major-league game lasted 3 hours, 8 minutes in 2014. That is the longest of any year in MLB history, according to Baseball Prospectus, which has archived data to 1950. By comparison, in 1980, the average game lasted 2 hours, 33 minutes.
A committee of baseball executives has been formed to look at ways to speed up the action because a short-attention span generation is growing tired of pitchers holding the ball too long between deliveries, hitters stepping in and out of the batter's box and catchers going to the mound repeatedly to chat with the pitcher.
MLB vice president Joe Torre, reacting to complaints, said he would like to explore ways to cut game times 10 to 15 minutes.
Not everyone aims to pitch as quickly as Mark Buehrle. New Cubs acquisition Jon Lester, for one, sees no reason to speed things up.
"It's baseball. It's a beautiful sport," Lester said. "There's no time limit, no shot clock ... there's no nothing. ... The fans know what they are getting into when they show up. So if it's a three-hour game, it's a three-hour game. If it's a five-hour game, it's a five-hour game. There's nothing you can do to change that."
One suggestion has been implementing and enforcing time limits for pitchers and hitters.
"Once you put a shot clock on a pitcher or the hitter or whatever ... I feel like if you go from a three-hour game to a 2-hour, 50-minute game ... is that really going to make a difference?" Lester said. "If you do that it takes the beauty out of the game."
Proponents of speeding up the game point to the rarely enforced Rule 8:04 in the MLB rule book, which states: "When the bases are unoccupied, the pitcher shall deliver the ball to the batter within 12 seconds after he receives the ball. Each time the pitcher delays the game by violating this rule, the umpire shall call "Ball.""
The average time pitchers held the ball between pitches in 2014 was 23 seconds. It was 21.5 seconds between 2008-11, according to Fangraphs.
"There's such a cat-and-mouse game as far as messing up a hitter's timing, messing up pitchers' timing ... different things that fans and people who have never played this game don't understand," Lester said.
"I think you are going down a path you don't want to go down."
