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LOS ANGELES – In the early hours of Wednesday morning, in the home pavilion under the former bleachers of Fenway Park, following Boston's victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers in the first game of the world series, Alex Cora, the coach of the Red Sox , congratulated the left-field player Andrew Benintendi, 4 for 5 with three points that night, on a well-played match.
"Excellent game," said Cora.
Benintendi's tired answer: "It's time to go to bed."
He may not even know it, but at that time, Benintendi was talking about the whole universe of baseball, at least part of the east coast of the United States. The match tonight, completed in nine rounds, had started at 20:11. Eastern Time and it's over at 12:03, making its game time a tedious time of 3 hours 52 minutes. And it was not even close to being the longest in the post-season.
Unlike workers or schoolchildren in the area, Benintendi had the luxury of sleeping the next morning, before the second game on Wednesday night, a victory that the Red Sox also won in 3 hours and 12 minutes turbocharged. -no leader on the Dodgers in the top-seven series, which will continue Friday night at Dodgers Stadium.
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The frigid gaming rhythm of this post-season, associated with scheduled start times that were late at 20:39. Eastern time has revived an old, persistent criticism and – according to some – tired (no pun intended): that baseball does a disservice to fans by forcing them to choose between watching the end of the most important games of the year or go to sleep at a reasonable time. And that could contribute to the disappointing TV ratings of the series so far, with an audience for the second game, despite the confrontation of major market teams, which would have lost 15% from the second game of the year last between the Dodgers and the Houston Astros.
The start times, at least, are a simple matter of economy. Major League Baseball and its broadcast partners – for the World Series, owned by Fox Sports – are seeking to maximize the number of viewers for the flagship MLB product. The 20 hour hour (the first launch of all World Series games is scheduled at 8:09 pm this year) is a good compromise between reaching prime time viewers in the East and giving those in the West the opportunity to finish their work. It will probably not change.
"These issues raise some prejudices on the East Coast," said Commissioner Rob Manfred before the second match, about the start times. "We are aware of the fact that we are trying to serve [West Coast] the fans too. I understand that playing times can be difficult. It's difficult when the games end late. [But] we are trying to find a balance and get the window where we can give the most people in the country a meaningful opportunity to watch the game. "
During the star break, when asked if it was possible to play at least one World Series match of the day, perhaps as a kind of awareness gesture towards young children , Manfred shot him:
"We play more games in the after-season during the day than any other sport," he said. But "as far as the World Series is concerned, we do what any business would do, [which is to] put the games at a time when we will attract the greatest number of spectators. "
The problem, however, is less about the time the games start and the more when they end. The playful style of baseball in the playoffs has never been as obvious or as dramatic as it has been this month.
After having managed to reduce by five minutes the average time of a nine-round match in this regular season, from 3:05 in 2017 to 3h in 2018 – mainly by instituting a rule limiting the number of teams to six visits per game – baseball lost all that soil and then some in October. In the playoffs, the average of the nine-run matches lasted 3:36, up from 3:29 in 2017. While the playoffs were 24 minutes longer than the regular season games in 2017 , the gap is 36 minutes this year.
The post-season games are still about half an hour longer than regular season games, in part because of the longer commercial breaks and partly because of the larger stakes involved on each field.
But the increase from 2017 compared to 2017 suggests that something else has changed this post season. Already this month, there have been four nine-round playoff games that have gone over four hours, tied with 2016 for the most part in history; as recently as in 2012, there were none.
The changing patterns of launcher use in the modern game have undoubtedly had an effect, with more frequent and frequent pitching changes throughout the sport – epitomized by the Milwaukee Brewers' 'pacing' their way through the National League series of championships against the Dodgers. Only one starting pitcher since the start of the playoff season has withdrawn after the seventh inning: Clayton Kershaw of the Dodgers, who launched eight scoreless innings against the Atlanta Braves in the second game of the Division Series.
The first game of the World Series, for example, was marked by 12 throwers, 24 players in position, 24 strikeouts and 308 pitches. The Dodgers, in particular, have the ability to empty their bench and workplace every night to take advantage of matching percentages.
"There is a lot of talent, a lot of athletes. It's fun, "said Cora. "I know that people are talking about the pace of play and all that, but in the end [of the season]from now on, people do not care. Four o'clock, four-thirty, whatever. Because there is a lot of talent on the market. "
The main culprit that slows down games this month could be a relatively new development in the sport: widespread and persistent paranoia about the theft of billboards in the digital era, which manifested itself during two mini-scandals in the last 13 months, while two teams, the Red Sox and Astros, were intercepted with an Apple Watch and a smartphone, respectively, either to relay stolen signals or to protect them .
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This paranoia, in the absence of unlimited mound tours, was also manifested in the post-season by the tedious phenomenon of launchers and wrestlers, who used this type of long, complex and changing signals for slots. call that were once reserved for situations where the rider was in second place, but he now used them on all terrains.
"It slows down [the game] down, "Astros Manager A.J. Hinch said during the American League championship series. "We can use several panels without anyone on the base. . . . So it's very complicated, [and] you can blame him [complex pitch-signals] sometimes."
It is generally expected throughout the sector that baseball will eventually install, as of next season, clocks to launch to maintain the rhythm of the matches. With such a system, what Manfred has given as a political priority, pitchers and hitters would have 20 seconds between shots to be ready for the next pitch, and the referees of the marble could add a ball or a hit to the account to penalize them. lazy. . With an average of 24 seconds between launches in 2018, and an average of 297 shots per game, this could, at least theoretically, reduce by 20 minutes the average time of the match.
But the ground clock will be too late to save the 2018 playoffs from the dreaded midnight collapse. However, there are still many World Series games – a minimum of two, a maximum of five – we can be sure: they will probably play slowly and end late.
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