Levine: A three-hour tour: Is there an ideal length for a baseball game?
From SABR member Zachary Levine at Baseball Prospectus on August 28, 2014:
At the heart of the biggest conversation going on in baseball right now, there is one conversation we’re not having.
We hear all about the games being too long. It’s item 1 or 2 on every listicle in the wake of Rob Manfred’s ascent to commissioner-in-waitingness. It’s the subject of countless hot takes (3 balls! 7 innings! No mound visits!). It’s the subject of countless lukewarm takes that don’t deserve exclamation points (just enforce the rules on pitchers). And it often gets spliced with the discussion on pace of game, which would be a worthy one were not all the evidence presented in the form of game length.
But as we discuss this back and forth and back and forth, there’s one thing missing from the conversation: Nobody’s really talking about how long games should be.
And I mean what I say: a serious conversation about how long games really should be, not how long they used to be.
Read the full article here (subscription required): http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=24531
Originally published: August 28, 2014. Last Updated: August 28, 2014.