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One thing you'll never hear from a fan at a baseball game: "Slow down!" Indeed, while many find baseball's leisurely pace relaxing, others feel America's pastime moves too darn slow. The average baseball game takes around 2 hours and 48 minutes to complete. That's actually shorter than a college football game (which averages 3 hours and 21 minutes), yet for the less-patient spectator, nine innings of baseball can feel like a week. According to this page from Dr. Mike Marshall, a fastball takes about .467 seconds to travel from pitcher to catcher's glove. So
an average play, with the pitcher pitching and the batter either taking a ball or swinging and missing, takes less than half a second. Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly timed a ball in play during a 2000 playoff game. The game lasted 3 hours and 15 minutes, and the ball was in play a total of 12 minutes and 22 seconds (and Reilly admitted to being "generous with the stopwatch"). Do the math and you'll see that for 94% of the game, players were either spitting seeds, jumping in and out of the batter's box, or adjusting themselves. Along those same lines, in 1956, a sportswriter named Dick Wade timed the actual "action" during a game and found that the ball was in play for 9 minutes and 55 seconds. Neither Wade's nor Reilly's findings are scientific, but their point is proven nonetheless. When watching baseball, just about any time is a good time to go for a beer.
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