Rather than allowing players to continue on ad infinitum in the final set, a tiebreaker will take place when the score reaches 12–12. Earlier this month, the All England Lawn Tennis Club announced a rule change designed to avoid final sets that stretch on for hours. Baseball is not without peers in its desire to stem the length of its matchups, and it could look to the recent changes at Wimbledon for ideas on where to start. Major League Baseball has taken steps to speed up games in recent seasons, including limiting mound visits and reducing the length of commercial breaks, but none has made much of a meaningful difference. There’s nothing joyful about staying up all night and spending the length of a flight from New York to Paris watching a game for most committed fans, to say nothing of viewers who don’t regularly keep up with the sport. It was the longest game in postseason history, stretching across 18 innings, 561 pitches, and likely several cups of coffee for anyone interested in catching the entire thing. The slow speed only worsened during the World Series, with Game Three lasting-this is not a typo-seven hours and 20 minutes. Not only did the teams reign supreme on the field, but they also led the league in average game length this season, with both teams clocking in at a ridiculous pace of three hours and 13 minutes.
The Red Sox and Dodgers are particularly guilty of a slow pace of play. The average baseball game stretched for three hours and four minutes this season, 10 minutes longer than it did at the beginning of the wild-card era. As fans have been pointing out for years, playing nine innings simply takes too long. One reason, perhaps, for this declining interest is that keeping up with a baseball team is practically a full-time job. Read: The simple technology that accidentally ruined baseball.
2018 MLB SCHEDULE RED SOX SERIES
It’s not just the World Series that fell flat this year: Regular-season fan attendance cratered to a 14-year low in 2018, down by nearly 10 million people since its 2007 peak. Still, the lackluster numbers have left MLB officials flummoxed, including Commissioner Rob Manfred, who told SportsBusiness Journal that league leaders “haven’t isolated a cause” for the dip. Of course, Major League Baseball cannot expect to replicate the sky-high viewership of, for example, the 2016 World Series, when the Chicago Cubs captured their first title in more than a century and more than 40 million people tuned in to watch them do it. Ratings lagged for this year’s face-off, with Game One drawing in the fourth-fewest viewers of any World Series opener on record. But the series’ audience size didn’t reflect its supposed import or historical bona fides.
The bicoastal matchup pitted two of baseball’s most storied franchises, in two of America’s largest media markets, against each other. Major League Baseball has long been losing its grip on the title of America’s pastime, and the 2018 championship series is emblematic of why.Ī Dodgers–Red Sox World Series should have been a cash cow.
From games that stretched way past most people’s bedtimes to the obsessive nature of modern managing, staying engaged throughout the Red Sox’s run felt more like a duty than an escape. But though the World Series provided its share of wonder, it is far from an instant classic. With help from the pitcher David Price, who finally seemed to overcome his postseason demons, and the journeyman first-baseman Steve Pearce, whose three home runs in Games Four and Five earned him the MVP award, Boston managed to sustain its stellar regular-season play into October. The Red Sox defeated the Dodgers in five games to secure the franchise’s fourth World Series title since it ended its 86-year championship drought in 2004. It is also, as the World Series–winning Red Sox illustrate, a dreadful chore.
It is maddening, unpredictable, and altogether emotionally draining. Playoff baseball turns bloody socks into priceless memorabilia, and 12-year-old suburbanites into folk heroes.
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