Baseball’s pace-of-play rules have made for quicker games than in recent memory. But they’ll be hard-pressed to approach the all-time record set by the Giants and Phillies in 1919 No matter how many rules Major League Baseball adds to speed up play, it is safe to say that no two teams will ever be able to beat the record for the fastest nine-inning game in big-league history: 51 minutes. Not one hour and 51 minutes. Fifty-one minutes.On 28 September 1919, five days before the Cincinnati Reds met the Chicago White Sox in an infamous World Series tattered by gambling, the New York Giants beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 6-1, in New York in the first game of a doubleheader – in...
Some thought Major League Baseball games with pitch clocks might feel forced, rushed, even gimmicky. But the new rules have proven to be a rousing successThe time – emphasis on time – has come to declare that Major League Baseball has nailed its effort to speed up games. MLB people always talked about wanting to finish games in less than three hours, but they never could make it happen. Now they have.The average time of a game in the first two-plus months of the season is 2hr 40min – a span not seen since the early 1980s – much shorter than the bloated averages of 3hr 6min in 2022 and 3hr 11min in 2021. But stats are only part of...
The crumbling stadium that’s prompted the Athletics’ move to Las Vegas was just as cavernous, threadbare, outdated and unfashionable as advertised. Naturally, I loved itOakland-Alameda County Coliseum, the fifth-oldest stadium in Major League Baseball where the A’s have called home since 1968, has been called baseball’s last dive bar. A brutalist concrete doughnut short on grandeur and long on character, seated next to a Bart station at the center of an industrial waste land, no one could ever mistake it for the sport’s revered old cathedrals like Boston’s Fenway Park, Chicago’s Wrigley Field or Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.When I paid the princely sum of $2 for a ticket to a recent Wednesday afternoon game against the Cubs, the stadium...
Tabbed for no higher than third in the AL East by most experts, the Rays have won 12 straight and are off to baseball’s hottest start in decades. How are they doing it and how long will it last?With their 9-7 win over the Boston Red Sox on Wednesday night, the Tampa Bay Rays became just the third team to win 12 straight games to open a baseball season since the dead-ball era more than a century ago. With one more win, the Rays will tie the 1987 Milwaukee Brewers and the 1982 Atlanta Braves as the only teams to begin a season with 13 consecutive victories since the 1880s.The winning streak is the latest achievement for a team known...
The tradition of greedy owners destroying what makes baseball good to line their pockets is as old as the sport itself. But using a pandemic to expand the playoffs for good would be a new lowOne of the first examples of baseball’s near-sighted willingness to deface itself in the name of maximum profits came in 1887 when, in an effort to boost attendance for the upcoming season, the joint major-league rules committee decided to allow the batter four strikes instead of three. Chaos ensued, predictably, and they changed the rule back for 1888.Indeed, the blight of greedy owners content to muck with the formula and squeeze every possible dime out of the enterprise at the expense of what makes baseball...