Quote:
Originally Posted by pilight
The longer games aren't caused by more offense. We haven't gotten any more offense. MLB average last year was 4.53 runs per game, exactly the same as it was in 1961. Every season of the 1930's had a higher scoring average. The games weren't going three hours each back then. The longer games are caused by micromanagement and excessive pitching changes.
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Even all the pitching changes might add 5 to 10 minutes to the game. It's the fact that there are just plain so many pitches thrown - which, speaking of, I'm convinced that part of the reason why pitchers have relatively little stamina nowadays is that you could put a guy on a 100 pitch count as recently as the 1980s and still get 6+ innings out of them on average (the Astros did that with Nolan Ryan, who was even a pretty high pitch count guy for the era). Now 90-100 pitches carries you into the 5th, maybe the 6th.
And on top of that players take a lot more time than they used to between pitches, which is something that MLB has kind of tried to half-assedly address.