Baseball Games Only Have 18 Minutes Of Playing Time

Baseball is America's "past time." An honored tradition in sports. It's our countries "Game". All summer long, sometimes in the blistering heat, we sit at a ballpark and watch our favorite team play (or maybe in the comforts of your favorite pub).

Sure the games only last an average of two hours and thirty minutes but when it comes down to it, how much of what you watch is actual play?

A new study from the Wall Street Journal attempted to find out. Bare in mind, they used a very unscientific "stopwatch" approach to their experiment. They watched three games and counted anything that could be considered actual "play of the game" - this included every pitch, hit, home-run, etc.

What did they find? There was only about 18 minutes of actual "baseball" played during the games.

What about the "down time" where the game isn't being played? That's divided up by change in batters, elapsed time between innings, the 7th inning stretch, pitcher changes, etc.

18 minutes of game time seems pretty bad, but not as bad as football who clocked in with 11 minutes of actual game time.