While talking with some friends earlier this week, I came to what I consider a stunning realization: as an adult, I’ve never watched more than a few innings of the World Series, outside of my Mets in 2015 and the Cubs’ historic run in 2016. This, as a huge baseball fan, was astounding for me to put together.
Now, the World Series has begun again, this year featuring the Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers. And this year, as in many years past, first pitch for each of these games is slated to start after 8pm ET; game 1, for example, began at 8:11 Tuesday, and at 3 hours 52 minutes long, Justin Turner didn’t strike out to end the game until 12:03 the next morning. It’s quite literally the worst thing about the Eastern time zone.
I’m not the only one who thinks this! It’s something I’ve heard from others, that games go on too long and simply end way too late for the average Eastern viewer. Originally, this post was going to be one long complaint about the state of the night postseason game, but I’ve decided to go in a different direction. Let’s put this in context, set within the history of night playoff baseball. Maybe I’ll feel different about the whole thing at the end.
Night baseball was initially a novelty, of course, and it naturally started as a marketing gimmick. The struggling Cincinnati Reds were the first Major League team to give it a try after seeing it successfully implemented in the minor leagues for several years. Supposed to debut on May 23, 1935, in Cincinnati, but pushed back to the next night, a Friday, due to rain, the Reds beat the Phillies 2-1 on May 24 at Crosley Field in an hour and a half in front of 20,000 people. With first pitch coming at 8:30, after having the lights lit by President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself from Washington, the game would have ended just after 10pm ET.
The stunt was well received. Said Philadelphia manager Jimmie Foxx, “You can see that ball coming up to the plate just as well under those lights as you can in daytime.” And in the offseason that year, the National League granted permission to its teams to play up to seven games under lights per season, that being one for every other team in the league at the time. The Brooklyn Dodgers would be the next team to install lights in 1938, then the first American League team, the Philadelphia A’s, would be lit in 1939.
It would take more than 30 years before a playoff game was started at night, though. Baseball owners were (and still are) primarily held hostage by tradition, so it’s not surprising that while every team but the Cubs had installed electric lights in their ballparks in those 30+ years (mostly in the ’40s, even), no pennant winners (or, starting in ’69, division winners) had decided to play at night.
On October 13, 1971, Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium hosted the hometown Pirates and the visiting Baltimore Orioles under the lights for Game 3 of the World Series. That, too, was a rousing success. More than 50,000 fans made it to the park; the TV audience broke 60 million viewers.
Night baseball would trickle into the World Series slowly over the next decade. By 1977, the Series had four night games. By 1985, the day World Series game was history. Other than Game 6 of the 1987 Series between St. Louis and Minnesota, every World Series game since 1985 has been played at night.
On its face, night baseball makes sense in a number of entirely obvious ways. More people can watch or attend them, being outside of work and school hours. The game can dominate prime-time television and radio. Since these are national games, the hours make the games more accessible for western fans to watch. And even games from the West Coast start no later than 8:45ET, which is understandable. So if it’s not the start times that keep me up each October, it must be the length of games.
According to 538, baseball games get much longer in the playoffs, as managers start to switch pitchers more frequently, replay reviews are scrutinized to get the call exactly right, and more commercials are crammed into the primo time slots. In the past three seasons, no playoffs has averaged games under 3 and a half hours. None have been under 3:20 since 1996. And none of that appears to be because of an increase in extra innings; there’s been the same number of extra-inning games in the last ten years as there were in the first ten years of night World Series baseball. So, when you have to start the games after 8pm for a national audience, that pushes your (ok, *my*) bedtime back to 11:30 or later.
Ultimately, I blame television for the delays. MLB mandates breaks of 2 minutes 15 seconds between half-innings for commercials, and longer during the postseason. From my experiences at the ballpark this year, there were plenty of times when pitchers had finished their warm-up tosses, fielders had thrown balls back into the bench, and the ump was simply waiting for the clock to tick down before starting play again. It may be just a few seconds per half-inning, but those add up, especially in an era when the league is trying to speed up the game.
I agree with Curtis Granderson, one of the smarter players in the league today, who was quoted in that Business Insider article, saying, “Why is it so difficult that if we’re ready to play, meaning the pitcher and the hitter, can’t we just go live and put the commercial on the side? We do we have to wait?…If you can just cut a minute off of each inning break, make it from three minutes to two minutes, you’ve already saved 18 minutes on the game.”
So, all in all, I’m still annoyed that I have to go to bed before the games are over. But perhaps that’s just a function of me being old now. Perhaps the only reason I don’t watch these games is because I don’t live in the Pacific time zone.
Outside of the influence of television, the game has evolved to the point where it’s longer and more cerebral. Naturally, we’re getting to see better baseball, and of course, in theory, the best baseball should be showcased in the World Series. So if we have to deal with staying up a couple extra minutes to watch, that should be a fine trade-off. Maybe I should just start drinking coffee.
UPDATE (10/29): The Series ended last night in a 4-1 win for the Red Sox. Appropriately enough, the day after I posted this, they went 18 innings over 7 hours and 20 minutes (absurd), marking the longest WS game in history (and I believe tying the record for longest postseason game in history). That means this Series sets the record for longest average time (4:16) and is the fourth-longest average regulation time (3:32) since 1985. I’ve updated the chart below (and made it easier to read as well).
