The length of the average baseball game has been drastically increasing over the last half decade, and over the past fifty years the average length of a game has increased by about forty minutes. The slowness of baseball has made baseball boring, and baseball must change its ways in order to bring back the excitement. There are many reasons that the game has increased in length, but there are also many things baseball can do to quicken games. All that has to happen is for MLB Commissioner Bud Selig to enforce a few simple rules that are already present in the baseball bylaws.

The average baseball game in 1963 took 2 hours and 25 minutes, compared to taking 3 hours and 8 minutes in 2014. So why has the game slowed down so much?  First off, in 2014 the average time between pitch is 23 seconds. This is ridiculous. This time should be brought down to about 10-12 seconds between pitches. With this one minor change, baseball could reduce a considerable amount of time and speed up the game.

The best part about this is baseball already has a rule in place – all they have to do is enforce it! Rule 8.04 in Major League Baseball’s rulebook says, “When the bases are unoccupied, the pitcher shall deliver the ball to the batter within 12 seconds after he receives the ball. Each time the pitcher delays the game by violating this rule, the umpire shall call Ball.”

The other way baseball can increase its speed is by not letting batters step out of the box and redo their batting gloves every at bat. Rule 6.02: “The batter shall not leave his position in the batter’s box after the pitcher comes to Set Position, or starts his windup.” The rule later goes on to state if the batter steps out a strike may be called against him. If strikes were called for stepping out of the box batters wouldn’t want to get a strike, thus they stay in the box reducing the down time of the game.

The last and simplest way to speed up the game is to reduce the commercial time between innings by one minute. Of course Major League Baseball would never do this, as they are profit driven and don’t want to lose any money. Of course they could just increase the price for a commercial to even out the profit. By doing just this they could reduce the length of the game by nearly 20 minutes!

If baseball could reduce the average length of the game it would bring me back to watching the game and other people would probably come back. Tyler Beauregard a junior at Holyoke High School says, “Baseball is extremely slow and boring. I do not watch it anymore because it is too slow and the game needs to speed up for me to come back and enjoy the sport.” Baseball is way too slow the way the game is being played right now, but baseball can change a few things to speed it up and bring fans back.