The 2019 World Series has now ended (congratulations, Nationals!), which means it’s time to update my post from last year about night baseball and the World Series.
We got lucky this year; even though the Series went a full seven games, only two were over four hours (game two was 4:01, and game three was 4:03). But, despite that, only one ended up being under three and a half hours (game five was 3:19).
Altogether, the average length for a game this year was 3 hours, 44 minutes, and 43 seconds, which makes it fourth Series in the past five years to have a game-length average between 3:40 and 3:50.
However, if we ignore the extra inning games, this is actually the second-longest World Series game average length since the World Series became a night-based event in 1985. The longest averaged slightly longer in 2007 at 3 hours, 45 minutes, and 45 seconds. That was the Series in which Boston swept Colorado, and no game was faster than three and a half hours. Interesting!
And here’s one more fun fact for you: this Washington-Houston World Series is the first (definitely in the night ball era; possibly ever) in which there were multiple nine-inning games that spanned more than four hours.
