ARE THERE TOO MANY STRIKE OUTS IN BASEBALL? Brian Costa in the Wall Street Journal (May 3-4) argued (here) that baseball is too slow and takes too much time. He points out that the length of the average baseball game this season is 3:08. (For comparison, the schedules for Sunday professional football games have an early game at 1:00 and a late game, starting right after the first game, at 4:15—three hours and 15 minutes.) I posted here about how my father used to say when he read complaints about baseball games being too long that it was sportswriters who made the biggest fuss about long games because they wanted to get their work over with.
Costa argues that games are lasting longer because there are too many strike outs. He explains that the interesting action in a baseball game is the sight of a ball being put into play. He criticizes strike outs because “strikeouts guarantee two things: at-bats that last at least three and usually four or more pitches, and a whole lot of standing around in the field.”
I would argue more strikeouts are favorable to pitchers and correlate to home runs so either you’re getting home runs which are exciting or lots of outs quickly which should shorten the game.
Generally my reaction to people complaining about game length relates to people just not liking the sport very much.