As we’ve watched the average time of a major-league game increase year after year, the issues of time of play and pace of play have come front and center for teams and executives all over baseball.
Simply put, MLB is trying to get more action crammed into less total time and stop the disturbing trend of games taking longer and longer.
With the early returns in, it looks like the league overall, is losing that battle with both time and pace of play looking like they’ll be trending upward another year. Because I’m a curious person, I wanted to see how the 2017 Atlanta Braves are doing in these two areas to see if they’re more a part of the problem, or part of the solution.
Couple things before we jump in. One, this information doesn’t really have much functional use other than just knowing it. It’s interesting to me and hopefully, to some of you, but it doesn’t really effect performance or value in any way.
Two, both of these concepts have some natural context built in. We assign numbers to individuals and teams but obviously, this is a game of pitcher vs batter, team vs team. Naturally, playing slower opponents will slow your time and pace so it’s important to know there’s a bit of noise mixed in with the signal.
With that let’s jump in.