Baseball in 2018 is a game of fewer balls in play, more strikeouts and more pitching changes. It's no wonder the game feels so slow.
The first game of the 1916 World Series—otherwise known as the last time the Red Sox and Dodgers met in the Fall Classic—took two hours and 16 minutes to play. It was slow relative to that season as a whole (or so we can infer; average time of game for 1916 is unavailable, but over the previous five years, it clocked in at just under two hours), but it was a sprint compared to the marathons we’re enduring in 2018. A 136-minute contest would’ve placed in the 99th percentile of game lengths from this season and was 48 minutes shy of the year’s average of 3:04.…
