On Sunday, Cubs beat the Royals 5-0 in what was a sub 2-hour game, generating some buzz:
along with some consternation:
So what’s the deal with 2 hour games? Let’s break this down through some questions
How frequent are they?
Pandemic Note🦠😷: There were a lot of sub 2-hour games between 2020-2021 that are being ignored because they were only 7 innings
With that out of the way, the # of regular season 9-inning games that went less than two hours over the last 20 seasons:
Naturally, you may wonder how many of these games between 2003-2010 were started by Mark Buehrle, and here are the Buehrle splits:
What type of games end up being sub 2-hours?
Majority of these games are at night (although most games are at night anyways):
Breaking down the W-L between Home/Road team is where the concerning trend emerges. Home Teams are a whopping 61-8 in sub 2-hour games, and in 34 (almost half) of those games, the road team was shutout:
Comparing attendance of each games attendance to the average home attendance of that team:
In a majority of these games, the crowd is somewhere from 10% to 50% below the team’s average home attendance.
So what’s the call?
While shorter game times are being celebrated in 2023, there’s certainly games that could be “too short”, and sub 2-hour games seem to fit that category, where the overwhelming majority of home teams wins in a shutout in front of an underwhelming crowd
