http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/sports/baseball/length-of-a-game.html 2016-10-16 00:02:26 Time (It Takes to Complete a Game) Isn’t on M.L.B.’s Side Even in a season where the length of games ticked up, Game 5 between the Dodgers and the Nationals stands out, taking 4 hours 32 minutes to complete. === The The marathon affair — “It was probably the craziest, if not the craziest game I’ve ever been a part of in my career, in my life,” Max Scherzer, the pitcher who started the game for Washington, told reporters after the game. “This is a tough one to be on the wrong side of.” Scherzer was right that a game of four and a half hours was crazy, but it was not all that surprising since the two teams had played a nine-inning game that went 4:12 just three days before. None of the contests in the five-game series went to extra innings, but their average length was a remarkable 4:01. Game 4 represented the fastest game of the series, at 3:44. Even in a postseason landscape in which the average game has stretched to 3:30, Game 5 between the Nationals and Dodgers was special. The seventh inning alone took 66 minutes, with Washington burning through six pitchers in the inning. The Nationals started the inning up by 1-0 and ended it down by 4-3. For an idea of just how absurd a 66-minute inning is, the New York Giants and the Philadelphia Phillies once played an entire nine-inning game in 51 minutes. Even in 1919, that was a notable feat, but Major League Baseball could probably use a few players with Bancroft’s initiative after a season in which the average game length, according to The uptick was widespread; only two teams, the Oakland Athletics and the Kansas City Royals, finished the season with an average game length of less than three hours. The Arizona Diamondbacks topped everyone with an average of 3:14. Six teams averaged 3:10 or longer per game. In an “We’re going to put a package of issues on the table with the union,” he said. “Speculating about which ones I like and don’t like is counterproductive to that process at this point. I think the best I can do for you at this point is to say I’m prepared to think about additional rule changes that are relevant to the issue of pace of play.” The postseason is obviously a different animal, as it is hard to believe that any fan watching the Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw come out for a save attempt just two days after winning Game 4 was concerned about how long he was taking to close things out. But for M.L.B., which has made a priority of improving the pace of its games, a postseason of contests going deep into the night — on the heels of a season in which the sport lost traction in its attempts to speed things up — has to be somewhat troubling. At the very least, avoiding any more 66-minute innings would be a good start.