Tuesday night at 8:08 p.m. in Boston, Red Sox pitcher Nathan Eovaldi is scheduled to throw the first pitch in the American League wild-card game. American sports has no greater rivalry, the Sox and Yankees are both very hot teams, and the most exciting innovation in the last 30 years of baseball is this single winner-take-all elimination game that is the wild-card playoff.
Yet, I’ll still probably fall asleep. That’s because the game will probably end after 11:30 and might last into the wee hours of Wednesday morning.
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Three hours and eight minutes is the average length of a Major League game. Red Sox games last longer, averaging 3:17:00, just 1 minute longer than the average Yankees game. The Sox and Yankees played 16 nine-inning games this year, and half of them lasted more than 3 1/2 hours. The mean was 3:24:00.
Add in the winner-take-all nature of this game, it’s likely we will get many pitching changes. That means a very long game.
But a very long game doesn’t have to mean a very late night. You see, they could start the game earlier.
Both New York and Boston are in the Eastern time zone. You could easily start the game at 6:30 or even 6 and not put anyone out. I know some people think that everyone in America just wants to watch the Yankees-Sox play constantly, but maybe the league should cater to the teams’ actual fans, who are very concentrated in their actual cities.
More to the point, the league should cater to the young fans. Baseball is a game, after all, and games are for children.
When the games, on a school night, start late and go super late, then fewer children get to watch the game, and fewer still get to see the ending. That means fewer young fans, which means fewer future fans. There is no way that trade-off is worth the extra advertising revenue for West Coast eyeballs.
