Baseball tries to beat the clock to appeal to younger fans

The writer is a contributing columnist, based in Chicago

Baseball, America’s pastime, has been passing altogether too much of the nation’s time for years. Even life-long fans like me had to admit that too many games were long, slow and boring. But now Major League Baseball has stepped in with sweeping rule changes aimed at attracting younger fans by speeding up a sport geared too much to boomers for comfort. My favourite sport’s future depends on the success of this move.

For decades, US baseball has been slowing down just as US culture has sped up. MLB says that by last year, the average game took 3:04 hours, 35 minutes longer than when my home team, the Detroit Tigers, won the baseball World Series in 1968. With my (long) boomer attention span, I could tolerate low-scoring, low-hitting, sometimes four-hour games — but my Generation Z children would not. They began to boycott baseball. 

A February Ipsos poll found that while 38 per cent of Americans in the 55-plus age group described themselves as baseball fans, only 23 per cent of the 18-34 crowd did. That most quintessentially American of all sports needed a revamp to survive.

Enter this season’s new rule changes, voted through by MLB’s competition committee last September — and so far they seem to be working. The most obvious is the “pitch clock”: pitchers must begin delivery within 15 seconds if bases are empty, 20 seconds with a man on base and 30 seconds between batters. Surveys show fans are glad that pitchers can no longer indulge in seemingly endless rituals involving readjusting bits of their anatomy or equipment with every pitch. Other changes make it easier for players to “steal” bases — taking those that they are not entitled to — which MLB says fans love above all other moves.

Alex, 20, watching last week’s Chicago Cubs-Milwaukee Brewers match, illustrates what the sport is up against with young people. “This is my first baseball game ever, and I’m dying of boredom!” he complained as we waited for play to resume after the traditional “seventh-inning stretch”. “I wanted to play games on my phone but there isn’t even any WiFi.”

But the effects of the recent changes have been dramatic. MLB says the average length of a nine-inning game so far this year is 2:38, the shortest since 1984 and down from 3:05 at this time last season. Attendance is up 7.7 per cent, with the average rising from under 26,000 at this point last year to nearly 28,000 now. Scoring is up (9.1 runs per game against 8.7 at this time last year) and the stolen base success rate is 79.3 per cent, the highest in baseball history. 

“And it’s the youngest fans who are the most positive about the changes,” Morgan Sword, MLB executive vice-president for baseball operations told me. MLB says its polling shows nearly 90 per cent of fans under 45 say they are more likely to watch baseball now, and the median age of ticket buyers is six years younger than in 2019. 

Lary Sorensen, who pitched for 10 years in the major leagues including for both the Cubs and the Brewers, tells me “we are such an instant results society that people don’t want to wait a full minute for something to happen”. But, he says “it’s not so much the length of the game as its pace” that matters to fans. The recent Cubs-Brewers game illustrated his point: it only finished four minutes shy of the three-hour mark, but with plenty of scoring and an eighth-inning home run that turned the tide, few of the fans were complaining. 

Fred Fieweger, 71, former stockbroker and life-long fan, says “the game has a much better flow now,” and John, 44, shepherding three young teens clutching baseball mitts to the game, says “it makes you more engaged because the plays are happening a lot faster”. 

Sorensen admits “baseball is a game of the older generation” — he and I went to the same high school and just celebrated our 50th school reunion — “but every generation has had to pass it on to the next and I think we are seeing that now”.

My seat neighbour at the Cub-Brewers game, Todd, 36 — clutching his one-year-old son, and surrounded by four-year-olds on a birthday outing — is sure the new rules will aid baseball’s survival into their old age. “The game is shorter and there is more action,” he says. “That certainly can’t hurt.”