‘Baseball, the Eternal Game, Shouldn’t Be Shortened’
How Baseball Saved Itself
For the July/August 2023 issue, Mark Leibovich went inside the desperate effort to rescue America’s pastime from irrelevance.
Thank you for the fantastic article on baseball. During the 1960s, I was a Ph.D. student in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan. About the time baseball season began one year, I participated in a robust argument over America’s favorite pastime with my colleagues. I felt that it was an incredibly boring way to spend time, and I wanted to debate the subject with empirical evidence. As engineers, we agreed to define “action” as any time the ball or a player was moving. I then used a stopwatch to determine the ratio between “elapsed time” and “action” in a typical game.
I applied this definition to a game the following Saturday. Unsurprisingly, the ratio was
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