More on Pace of Play

April 28, 2015

Here and here I’ve put forward a few thoughts on MLB pace of play and the relative impotence of this year’s rule changes to make much of a difference. Today I learned that Baseball Reference has compiled a page with some important pace of play data.

Most interesting to me here is the time/9IP metric, which normalizes data to neutralize an abnormal prevalence of games that go more or less than a full nine innings. I hadn’t thought to do this, and though it doesn’t matter much (historically 3-6 minutes on a per-game basis), better analysis is better analysis.

Interestingly, the page doesn’t get into per-pitch analysis. It does list plate appearances per game and pitches per plate appearance, but doesn’t take the obvious next steps and list pitches/game or seconds/pitch.

A quick look at the data (which has more games than my prior analysis) shows this year to be about in line with 2012. Still slower than the 1998-2011 period, but faster than 1988-1997, in the asking-to-be-improved pitches/game metric.