Baseball durations after the pitch clock

Summary

Next post Previous post September 30, 2025 at 8:20 PM by Dr. Drang A couple of years ago, after Major League Baseball announced they’d start using a pitch clock, I said I would write a post about the change in the duration of regular season games. I didn’t. My recent post about Apple’s Sports app and its misunderstanding of baseball standings reminded me of my broken promise. I decided to write a new game duration post after the 2025 season ended. Unfortunately, Retrosheet, which is where I get my data, hasn’t published its 2025 game logs yet. I decided to go ahead with the post anyway, mainly because putting it off would probably lead to my forgetting again. So here’s the graph of regular season durations through the 2024 season. When the 2025 data comes in, I’ll update it (I hope). The black line is the median duration, and the light blue zone behind it is the interquartile range. The middle 50% of games lie within that range. Clearly, there was a huge dropoff in 2023, so I’d say the pitch clock was a big success. The further reduction in 2024 was within the historical year-to-year duration change—I wouldn’t attribute any significance to it. 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. I made the graph more or less the same way I made the last one, although I combined some of the steps into a single script. First, I downloaded and unzipped all the yearly game logs since 1920 from Retrosheet. They have names like gl1920.txt. Then I converted the line endings from DOS-style to Unix-style via dos2unix gl*.txt I got the dos2unix command from Homebrew. I concatenated all the data into one big (189 MB) file using cat gl*.txt > gl.csv Although the files from Retrosheet have a .txt extension, they’re actually CSV files (albeit without a header line). That’s why I gave the resulting file a .csv ext...