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 20 to 1'for every hour of elapsed time, one would see just three minutes of action. Professional football and basketball have far more action per hour than baseball under the same definition, which I think explains their relative popularity. It wasn't solely the analytics revolution that slowed down the...
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