The pitch clock is undoubtedly the most impactful of the changes made recently to speed up the game. However, other changes were implemented alongside it that have contributed in meaningful ways:
- Limit on the number of times per plate appearance a pitcher can "disengage" by stepping off/calling time or making a pickoff move.
- Limit on the number of times per plate appearance a batter can "disengage" by stepping out/calling time.
- Minimum of 3 batters must be faced by an incoming relief pitcher (or must finish the half-inning)
- Limit on the number of mound visits per game
- Larger bases
- Elimination (mostly) of the defensive "shift"
- Team at bat starts with an automatic "ghost" runner on 2nd base in extra innings
The unlimited pickoffs were ridiculous. It technically meant the game could simply not progress until either the pitcher or the runner made a mistake. Glad it's no longer the case.
To be pedantic I don’t think the 3-batter rule mentions relief pitchers. If a team wanted to use an opening pitcher to face only the first batter and then replace him, that would also be against the rules.
The wildest thing about this chart is that it shows that from the 1920s to the 1940s you could conceivably watch a baseball game:
- that took less than 2 hours
- was in the afternoon
One baseball writer theorized that part of the decline in interest in baseball amongst kids is b/c they moved to night games so kids couldn't watch anymore (bed time etc etc).
e.g. many older people speak fondly of getting home from school and listening / watching a baseball game of their home team.
1. baseball competes in a sea of media and multimedia options and its competition has been growing ever since TV moved into the cable-era. Now it also has to compete with internet, games, social media, etc. Theres only so much time and attention for people to focus on it.
2. Long season. I love baseball but you can go 2-3 weeks not watching a game and have missed nothing.
3. Cost to go to games plus location of stadiums in car-centric areas often means painful commutes to the games for most Americans and then bringing two kids is like making it a $400 affair between parking, food, souvenirs etc. That's expensive for a lot of people.
The exit of people from the cities into the burbs in the mid-20th did a lot of damage to the idea of going to a game.
Agreed, this is pretty huge. I think at one point in my early teen years (I think 2008? My recollection was that it was a year the Phillies were in it, although that could have been 2009) there was a game in the World Series that got postponed and had to be restarted the next night, and because it already was a few innings in, the remainder the next night started maybe at 8 and ended at 10, which was much nicer given that I always struggled with the early morning starts for school.
The other major thing I think affected it is that in most of the markets where baseball is most popular, ticket prices skyrocketed over the past few decades, and a lot of the more popular teams would sell out for almost every game pretty early on in the year. Growing up in the Boston area, it was pretty noticeable how much more of a hassle it became for my dad to take my brothers and I to Red Sox games in the early 2000s[1]. In my earliest years, I remember my father taking us each to one game individually each season as well as usually a couple with all of us there, but it got to the point where eventually he'd just buy all of us tickets for one game because getting tickets to 5-6 separate games just wasn't worth the money. He and I started going to a lot of minor league games in my high school years just because we enjoyed getting to see baseball in person enough, but my brothers generally weren't as interested in taking an hour or two to ride to New Hampshire to see the Fishercats or something similar. I have to imagine that this phenomenon made it a lot harder to get kids interested in baseball for my generation.
[1] Yes, this also happened to coincide with the years that the Red Sox started doing really well, but that wasn't necessarily the cause. Their streak of sell-outs that lasted close to a decade iirc started earlier than the 2004 season, and the prices were not nearly as high (even after adjusting for inflation) in previous times they had made it to the World Series. My dad had told stories about going to see large numbers of games despite being a mostly in debt grad student in the mid eighties, including the year they won the penant in 1986. Baseball just wasn't as expensive to see in person until relatively recently.
The speed of games in those days was influenced by very little reliance on relievers (it's why Cy Young is the leader in wins AND losses, though even in recent history, Nolan Ryan had more complete games in some years that many pitchers today have in their ENTIRE careers). The need for breaks between innings, switching pitchers, etc to fit with TV commercial breaks is also an influence.
Until recently I had only ever been to one baseball game.. saw the Jays when I was 10. I remember falling asleep at the game because it was so slow and boring, and never really watched baseball after that.
But in the last couple years I’ve seen the Mets and Phillies multiple times, and it’s now one of my favourite sports to watch thanks to the pitch clock increasing the pace of the game. I’d be really curious to see data on how many new fans the league got after the change.
COVID did such a number on attendance that it's hard to separate anything else out. It has been increasing since it bottomed out but is still below the peak.
The best I can say: it was falling before the pandemic and it's now above where it was even before everything shut down. So... maybe?
> I remember falling asleep at the game because it was so slow and boring, and never really watched baseball after that.
If you listen to people talking about how they loved going to the game with their family, it's usually about what they did to pass the time during the boredom. It was America's pastime, because you needed to figure out how to pass time during the boredom.
The pitch clock is nice though, gives a rythym to action.
That said, minor league baseball is a lot more fun to watch because there's a lot more variance, and they have a lot of stuff going on between the innings to keep you awake ;)
This is why the Savannah Bananas (and the banana league) are so popular. Banana-ball draws sellout crowds wherever they play. The main focus is "don't be boring."
The graph shoes interquartile range, so this wouldn't be a factor, but worth noting: baseball also changed its rules on extra inning games in the past few years which speeds things up. A runner starts on second base which reduces the 0-run extra innings that are responsible for the 19 inning game I remember as a kid. [0]
A summer afternoon, static on the radio, the low hum of an announcer calling balls and strikes like he’s reading scripture in a Midwest church. Baseball used to be stitched together with silence. You heard the game as much in the pauses as in the plays.
Then the voice came in. Once the game hit the airwaves, it slowed. Had to. The ball waited for the broadcast.
Out of the dead-ball fog came the home run. No more bunting, no more clever thefts of second. Now it was swing, admire, trot. Alongside the homers came the walks and the strikeouts. Fewer balls in play. More staring, less running. Time thickened, and the nature of the game was trending towards longer games.
World War II shaved minutes from the clock. With so many players overseas, the talent pool shrank. The games got shorter because they became simpler. When the talent came back, the games got longer, largely because, after 1947, the game was flooded with previously segregated talent and players who were returning from overseas.
In the 60s, pitchers took over. Dominance from the mound. ERAs dropped. Batting averages plummeted. In 1968 they called it the Year of the Pitcher, then called the rulebook to fix it. Scoring came back, and with it, longer games.
Television followed with commercial breaks and camera angles. The game had to pause for sponsors. The seventh-inning stretch now came with a soft drink.
In the 70s, the bullpen became a revolving door. Specialists. Situational matchups. Every pitching change added minutes. Coaches walked the mound like they were heading to confession.
And the game kept expanding. OPS rose. More runners meant more pitches. More strikeouts meant more throws. Every batter became a saga.
If you look at the graph, you can see a trend that matches well with changes in baseball. We could probably break down every high and low to describe the shift based on rules, personal changes, etc.
Then came the pitch clock. No more dawdling. No more meditative pacing between pitches. And now a reliever has to face at least three batters in an inning. No more one-pitch exits.
It’s not that baseball got lazy. It got layered, commercialized, optimized, and strategized, but it forgot about time management.
The graph shows an outline, with the trends representing a chapter in baseball history, which is very cool.
The game has changed dramatically since the 1970s. My favourite example is from 1979.
In 1979, Phil Niekro lead the major leagues with 342 innings pitched. In 2025, Logan Webb lead the majors with 207 innings pitched.
Modern pitchers throw about 2/3 the pitches that pre-80s pitchers threw. Part of this is player safety - baseball destroyed some amazing arms. And part of it is the fact that relievers today tend to throw 98+.
Assuming approximately 0 commercials in 1920 with a runtime of 110 minutes -> 140 minutes. I'm trying to decide if there's 30 minutes of commercials, or not? I'm thinking about the standard sitcom (TV) commercial density which is a 23-24m show with 6-7m of commercials (25–33%). So... 30m seems in range?
I wouldn't say they're "so much longer" now (since the pitch clock was implemented, that is). This year, 9 inning games averaged 2:38. In 1960, they ran 2:33. There are lots of factors that contribute to longer gametime. A couple that correlate with the general trend for longer:
Commercial breaks are currently limited to 2 minutes by rule, and it takes some time just to run on and off the field, so I am dubious of the impact of that. (Though the rule has changed, and I forget whether there were an additional 20 minutes because of that back in the 1990s/2000s.)
That said, unless it were a stellar pitching duel, I'd really despise constant sub-2 hour games.
Sorta related: I feel instant replay challenges have sucked the life out of the game. Arguing with the ump over bad calls has never accomplished anything, but it's entertaining, it gets the blood flowing; it always made me feel more connected to the game and other fans. Now, managers just request an instant replay challenge, we wait a few minutes, and that's it - accurate, but boring.
For example, I watched around 100 games this season, but I can't recall a single instant replay challenge. However, ask anyone from St. Louis about "game 6" (typically, that's all you need to say!), and they'll get fired up, ranting about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyt1xEvqqow . Forty years later, people still remember that blown call like it was yesterday.
I'm fairly confident you're in the minority of serious fans on this one. Anecdotal, but I don't personally know a single big baseball fan that wants to go back to no instant replay.
Which doesn't mean they're necessarily happy with where instant replay is - particularly since New York relies on their own specific camera feeds, and sometimes don't have the same angles available as those watching on TV do. It's resulted in some fairly rage inducing incidents where we can clearly see the call was majorly blown from home, but the replay room can't overturn it from the angles they have. Every official camera feed should be available for them to use, imo.
What is shorter games doing for attendance, concession sales, ad sales on the TV broadcast? Seems like you want people stuck in the park for as long as possible (well, at least until they make them stop selling alcohol) but if that's too long, people simply won't go. Meanwhile, I have no idea whether longer or shorter games are better for TV. I would guess shorter is better? After an hour of the same insurance commercial over and over, you're either going to switch insurance companies or you're not. Seeing the ad 3 more times probably isn't worth very much.
You might be surprised. During the peak game length seasons, people would start trickling out around like the 5th or 6th inning, and by the 8th or 9th, the stadium could get surprisingly sparse even if it started full. My dad and my brothers and I used to have a habit of moving down from our bleachers seats after the seventh inning because there would be enough empty seats that we could often move into ones within the first few rows behind one of the dugouts to get a closer view of the last couple innings (and maybe increase our chances of getting a foul ball if we were lucky, which we generally weren't!). This got especially common when they tried to curb people driving home drunk by ending beer sales after the seventh inning, at which point instead of sticking around to sober up, quite a lot of people just opted to leave once they couldn't buy any more beer.
Where I am, the people I know are spending a lot less on concessions & alcohol. Not because of the shorter game but because the beer prices have become astronomical and the food quality has become terrible.
So instead we pregame nearby, maybe have a beer, and then go out afterwards.
My experience from going to giants games is that people leave when they want, not when the game is over (unless it's a nail biter). Same with arriving.
I will say, our personal experience and the comments of many fellow fans. The games seem more engaging, fun, and it's easier to be present and attentive for the whole game. That mentality and experience makes for better attendance in future games and a general attitude of "its worth the time".
Well, speeding up the gameplay doesn't affect the number of commercial breaks. There are 18 guaranteed commercial breaks per game (two per inning). I suppose the density of ads goes up. Good deal for advertisers.
(Additional commercial breaks may happen due to mid-inning pitching changes, and I suppose it's possible that the pitch clock affects the number of pitching changes, but it's not obvious to me whether they'd become more frequent or less frequent.)
(Though separately, they did make other rules to reduce the frequency of pitching changes. But OTOH pitching changes have been gradually becoming more common for decades, with starters hardly ever completing a game anymore.)
This would more than halve the amount of relief pitchers needed, so the MLBPA will never ever think about agreeing to it.
Starting pitchers averaged ~5.5 innings per game in 2024, and going 7 is hardly a rare occurrence. You would basically just have starters, 2-3 relief pitchers, one "long-man." vs. the average of 8 on the roster today.
> Games are now roughly as long as they were in the early ’80s, so the powers at MLB have cut about four decades of fat from the game. And they did it without reducing the number of commercials, because they’d never do that.
The commercialization of baseball is really ruining the game for me at times.
Company billboards and logos are in almost every square inch of empty space inside the stadiums now, making them look like giant versions of race cars with way too many tacky sponsor stickers. And just like race car drivers, these sponsor logos are creeping into the players' uniforms more and more each year, now placed prominently on one of the shoulders. If they made it into the jerseys I guess the hats are next to get ruined.
One of the worst examples are the led ad screens behind the batter, which sometimes in the tv broadcast they digitally overlay a different advertiser than what the folks in the stadium see, and it creates this messed up outline around the batter/catcher/ump that makes it look like the entire game is fake.
Then there are the tv announcers who are now required to attribute the replay on every exciting play to a different sponsor, like "this homerun replay is brought to you by Hefty! ... blah blah blah". They do it for homeruns, doubles, stolen bases, great catches, pitcher changes, even manager challenges!
But probably the most insidious practice is during an active game mid-inning, sometimes after a strikeout before the next batter gets to the plate, the tv broadcast will shrink the game down into one corner of the screen and play a regular, albeit shortened, commercial on most of the screen. No more announcer analysis about who is coming up to bat, or any other talking points relevant to the moment. Instead it's garbage commercial audio all the way up to the moment the pitcher is about to release the next pitch.
It's almost like they're trying to ruin the integrity of the sport. But I know the truth is simple corporate greed.
> But probably the most insidious practice is during an active game mid-inning, sometimes after a strikeout before the next batter gets to the plate, the tv broadcast will shrink the game down into one corner of the screen and play a regular, albeit shortened, commercial on most of the screen.
It's common for curling broadcasts to do this for lead stones (so a quarter of stones thrown). Rage-inducing.
> Company billboards and logos are in almost every square inch of empty space
This isn't new. Have you ever seen pictures of stadiums 100 years ago? I can recall people being upset a while back that the Green Monster was starting to be covered by ads. And yet one can find photos from way back when of it pretty much full of billboards.
For the record, I have managed to limit advertising for tykes to near 0. Young enough where control over electronics is viable.
As soon as a game pops up, the only unfiltered ad exposure basically, and it’s glue. The bright colors, the subconscious techniques, the hidden waveforms, whatever magic sauce they use to steal attention WORKS.
It’s like seeing a fairy tapping kids on the head and stealing all of their attention as they become droolingly attentive zombies to whatever drivel reserves the sales screen real estate for that time slice.
It is concerningly effective, and I can bet most everyone grew up saturated with it. Bordering on harassment/abuse since it can not be entirely avoided.
We went to see the Savannah Bananas tonight…they have a very dramatic “start the clock” opening. But when the clock starts, there’s 2:00 until the game is over.
It was kinda nice to know that it would end at a specific time.
My family went to see the July 4 fireworks at our minor league stadium this summer. I remember thinking “it’s 2-2, what if there’s extra innings? My kids will be devastated.”
I hope we as a society can find ways to keep baseball interesting…it’s really a beautiful game.
One of the interesting experiences I have being a member both of this community and the baseball analytics community is seeing posts like this, where apparently the author thinks that they're the only one who had the idea to look at this, shared widely within the hacker community because it comes from one of their own. Rest assured, within the _baseball_ community, this has been discussed and analyzed to death - it just doesn't get posted here because nobody mentions using unix tools to do it, because it isn't really relevant.
And many others, these are two early and relatively canonical ones. If folks reading this post are interested enough in baseball, please, come join us in the baseball analytics community where this is merely the very tippy top of the iceberg of interesting things.
[+] [-] oldandboring|5 months ago|reply
- Limit on the number of times per plate appearance a pitcher can "disengage" by stepping off/calling time or making a pickoff move.
- Limit on the number of times per plate appearance a batter can "disengage" by stepping out/calling time.
- Minimum of 3 batters must be faced by an incoming relief pitcher (or must finish the half-inning)
- Limit on the number of mound visits per game
- Larger bases
- Elimination (mostly) of the defensive "shift"
- Team at bat starts with an automatic "ghost" runner on 2nd base in extra innings
[+] [-] lc9er|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] raincole|5 months ago|reply
[0]: https://www.mlb.com/news/vince-coleman-drew-most-pickoff-thr... There was an at-bat with 17 pickoff attempts. It only took 7 minutes!
[+] [-] bobbylarrybobby|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] radpanda|5 months ago|reply
https://www.mlb.com/glossary/rules/three-batter-minimum
[+] [-] alexpotato|5 months ago|reply
- that took less than 2 hours
- was in the afternoon
One baseball writer theorized that part of the decline in interest in baseball amongst kids is b/c they moved to night games so kids couldn't watch anymore (bed time etc etc).
e.g. many older people speak fondly of getting home from school and listening / watching a baseball game of their home team.
[+] [-] voidfunc|5 months ago|reply
1. baseball competes in a sea of media and multimedia options and its competition has been growing ever since TV moved into the cable-era. Now it also has to compete with internet, games, social media, etc. Theres only so much time and attention for people to focus on it.
2. Long season. I love baseball but you can go 2-3 weeks not watching a game and have missed nothing.
3. Cost to go to games plus location of stadiums in car-centric areas often means painful commutes to the games for most Americans and then bringing two kids is like making it a $400 affair between parking, food, souvenirs etc. That's expensive for a lot of people.
The exit of people from the cities into the burbs in the mid-20th did a lot of damage to the idea of going to a game.
[+] [-] saghm|5 months ago|reply
The other major thing I think affected it is that in most of the markets where baseball is most popular, ticket prices skyrocketed over the past few decades, and a lot of the more popular teams would sell out for almost every game pretty early on in the year. Growing up in the Boston area, it was pretty noticeable how much more of a hassle it became for my dad to take my brothers and I to Red Sox games in the early 2000s[1]. In my earliest years, I remember my father taking us each to one game individually each season as well as usually a couple with all of us there, but it got to the point where eventually he'd just buy all of us tickets for one game because getting tickets to 5-6 separate games just wasn't worth the money. He and I started going to a lot of minor league games in my high school years just because we enjoyed getting to see baseball in person enough, but my brothers generally weren't as interested in taking an hour or two to ride to New Hampshire to see the Fishercats or something similar. I have to imagine that this phenomenon made it a lot harder to get kids interested in baseball for my generation.
[1] Yes, this also happened to coincide with the years that the Red Sox started doing really well, but that wasn't necessarily the cause. Their streak of sell-outs that lasted close to a decade iirc started earlier than the 2004 season, and the prices were not nearly as high (even after adjusting for inflation) in previous times they had made it to the World Series. My dad had told stories about going to see large numbers of games despite being a mostly in debt grad student in the mid eighties, including the year they won the penant in 1986. Baseball just wasn't as expensive to see in person until relatively recently.
[+] [-] bdcravens|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] toast0|5 months ago|reply
There's more night games than day games, but day games aren't unusual (at least they aren't unusual for west coast teams)
[+] [-] cafard|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dgs_sgd|5 months ago|reply
But in the last couple years I’ve seen the Mets and Phillies multiple times, and it’s now one of my favourite sports to watch thanks to the pitch clock increasing the pace of the game. I’d be really curious to see data on how many new fans the league got after the change.
[+] [-] jfengel|5 months ago|reply
https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/misc.shtml
COVID did such a number on attendance that it's hard to separate anything else out. It has been increasing since it bottomed out but is still below the peak.
The best I can say: it was falling before the pandemic and it's now above where it was even before everything shut down. So... maybe?
[+] [-] toast0|5 months ago|reply
If you listen to people talking about how they loved going to the game with their family, it's usually about what they did to pass the time during the boredom. It was America's pastime, because you needed to figure out how to pass time during the boredom.
The pitch clock is nice though, gives a rythym to action.
That said, minor league baseball is a lot more fun to watch because there's a lot more variance, and they have a lot of stuff going on between the innings to keep you awake ;)
[+] [-] relwin|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jackconsidine|5 months ago|reply
[0] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-jul-10-sp-alrdp...
[+] [-] jm4|5 months ago|reply
A game in 2 hours or less would be pretty awesome.
[+] [-] mkovach|5 months ago|reply
Then the voice came in. Once the game hit the airwaves, it slowed. Had to. The ball waited for the broadcast.
Out of the dead-ball fog came the home run. No more bunting, no more clever thefts of second. Now it was swing, admire, trot. Alongside the homers came the walks and the strikeouts. Fewer balls in play. More staring, less running. Time thickened, and the nature of the game was trending towards longer games.
World War II shaved minutes from the clock. With so many players overseas, the talent pool shrank. The games got shorter because they became simpler. When the talent came back, the games got longer, largely because, after 1947, the game was flooded with previously segregated talent and players who were returning from overseas.
In the 60s, pitchers took over. Dominance from the mound. ERAs dropped. Batting averages plummeted. In 1968 they called it the Year of the Pitcher, then called the rulebook to fix it. Scoring came back, and with it, longer games.
Television followed with commercial breaks and camera angles. The game had to pause for sponsors. The seventh-inning stretch now came with a soft drink.
In the 70s, the bullpen became a revolving door. Specialists. Situational matchups. Every pitching change added minutes. Coaches walked the mound like they were heading to confession.
And the game kept expanding. OPS rose. More runners meant more pitches. More strikeouts meant more throws. Every batter became a saga.
If you look at the graph, you can see a trend that matches well with changes in baseball. We could probably break down every high and low to describe the shift based on rules, personal changes, etc.
Then came the pitch clock. No more dawdling. No more meditative pacing between pitches. And now a reliever has to face at least three batters in an inning. No more one-pitch exits.
It’s not that baseball got lazy. It got layered, commercialized, optimized, and strategized, but it forgot about time management.
The graph shows an outline, with the trends representing a chapter in baseball history, which is very cool.
[+] [-] hluska|5 months ago|reply
In 1979, Phil Niekro lead the major leagues with 342 innings pitched. In 2025, Logan Webb lead the majors with 207 innings pitched.
Modern pitchers throw about 2/3 the pitches that pre-80s pitchers threw. Part of this is player safety - baseball destroyed some amazing arms. And part of it is the fact that relievers today tend to throw 98+.
[+] [-] thechao|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] spiesd|5 months ago|reply
That said, unless it were a stellar pitching duel, I'd really despise constant sub-2 hour games.
https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/misc.shtml
https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/bat.shtml
https://www.mlb.com/glossary/rules/warmup-pitches
[+] [-] codingdave|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] 0x445442|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jimt1234|5 months ago|reply
For example, I watched around 100 games this season, but I can't recall a single instant replay challenge. However, ask anyone from St. Louis about "game 6" (typically, that's all you need to say!), and they'll get fired up, ranting about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyt1xEvqqow . Forty years later, people still remember that blown call like it was yesterday.
[+] [-] cthalupa|5 months ago|reply
Which doesn't mean they're necessarily happy with where instant replay is - particularly since New York relies on their own specific camera feeds, and sometimes don't have the same angles available as those watching on TV do. It's resulted in some fairly rage inducing incidents where we can clearly see the call was majorly blown from home, but the replay room can't overturn it from the angles they have. Every official camera feed should be available for them to use, imo.
[+] [-] jrockway|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] saghm|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jghn|5 months ago|reply
So instead we pregame nearby, maybe have a beer, and then go out afterwards.
[+] [-] iancmceachern|5 months ago|reply
I will say, our personal experience and the comments of many fellow fans. The games seem more engaging, fun, and it's easier to be present and attentive for the whole game. That mentality and experience makes for better attendance in future games and a general attitude of "its worth the time".
[+] [-] xhkkffbf|5 months ago|reply
It's amazing how much non-action time there is an NFL broadcast. Some people don't watch because of it, but I suppose enough do.
[+] [-] kentonv|5 months ago|reply
(Additional commercial breaks may happen due to mid-inning pitching changes, and I suppose it's possible that the pitch clock affects the number of pitching changes, but it's not obvious to me whether they'd become more frequent or less frequent.)
(Though separately, they did make other rules to reduce the frequency of pitching changes. But OTOH pitching changes have been gradually becoming more common for decades, with starters hardly ever completing a game anymore.)
[+] [-] badlibrarian|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] zahlman|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Drblessing|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cthalupa|5 months ago|reply
Starting pitchers averaged ~5.5 innings per game in 2024, and going 7 is hardly a rare occurrence. You would basically just have starters, 2-3 relief pitchers, one "long-man." vs. the average of 8 on the roster today.
[+] [-] glitcher|5 months ago|reply
The commercialization of baseball is really ruining the game for me at times.
Company billboards and logos are in almost every square inch of empty space inside the stadiums now, making them look like giant versions of race cars with way too many tacky sponsor stickers. And just like race car drivers, these sponsor logos are creeping into the players' uniforms more and more each year, now placed prominently on one of the shoulders. If they made it into the jerseys I guess the hats are next to get ruined.
One of the worst examples are the led ad screens behind the batter, which sometimes in the tv broadcast they digitally overlay a different advertiser than what the folks in the stadium see, and it creates this messed up outline around the batter/catcher/ump that makes it look like the entire game is fake.
Then there are the tv announcers who are now required to attribute the replay on every exciting play to a different sponsor, like "this homerun replay is brought to you by Hefty! ... blah blah blah". They do it for homeruns, doubles, stolen bases, great catches, pitcher changes, even manager challenges!
But probably the most insidious practice is during an active game mid-inning, sometimes after a strikeout before the next batter gets to the plate, the tv broadcast will shrink the game down into one corner of the screen and play a regular, albeit shortened, commercial on most of the screen. No more announcer analysis about who is coming up to bat, or any other talking points relevant to the moment. Instead it's garbage commercial audio all the way up to the moment the pitcher is about to release the next pitch.
It's almost like they're trying to ruin the integrity of the sport. But I know the truth is simple corporate greed.
[+] [-] Marsymars|5 months ago|reply
It's common for curling broadcasts to do this for lead stones (so a quarter of stones thrown). Rage-inducing.
[+] [-] jghn|5 months ago|reply
This isn't new. Have you ever seen pictures of stadiums 100 years ago? I can recall people being upset a while back that the Green Monster was starting to be covered by ads. And yet one can find photos from way back when of it pretty much full of billboards.
[+] [-] _factor|5 months ago|reply
As soon as a game pops up, the only unfiltered ad exposure basically, and it’s glue. The bright colors, the subconscious techniques, the hidden waveforms, whatever magic sauce they use to steal attention WORKS.
It’s like seeing a fairy tapping kids on the head and stealing all of their attention as they become droolingly attentive zombies to whatever drivel reserves the sales screen real estate for that time slice.
It is concerningly effective, and I can bet most everyone grew up saturated with it. Bordering on harassment/abuse since it can not be entirely avoided.
[+] [-] hdgvhicv|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] iambateman|5 months ago|reply
It was kinda nice to know that it would end at a specific time.
My family went to see the July 4 fireworks at our minor league stadium this summer. I remember thinking “it’s 2-2, what if there’s extra innings? My kids will be devastated.”
I hope we as a society can find ways to keep baseball interesting…it’s really a beautiful game.
[+] [-] gre|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Fripplebubby|5 months ago|reply
See for example:
https://blogs.fangraphs.com/how-have-the-new-rules-changed-t...
https://www.baseball-reference.com/friv/rules-changes-stats....
And many others, these are two early and relatively canonical ones. If folks reading this post are interested enough in baseball, please, come join us in the baseball analytics community where this is merely the very tippy top of the iceberg of interesting things.