Thursday was opening day for Major League Baseball and the first taste of rules designed, among other things, to speed up a lagging game.
And speed up it did.
With the debut of the pitch clock, the average length of the first 11 games Thursday was around 2 hours 49 minutes, compared with 3 hours 6 minutes last year. There was a similar shift throughout spring training, when the clock shaved nearly half an hour off the average game.
Thursday’s average game time was on par with those in the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s what the game’s leaders had hoped for with the new rules: to resurrect the days of snappier, more action-packed games.
Pitchers now have 15 seconds for a delivery, 20 seconds if there’s a runner on base, and batters must be in the box ready to hit with at least eight seconds left. M.L.B. added other changes, including bigger bases and a ban on defensive shifts, to amp up the game’s offense.
We’re only a day in, and more data this season is likely to show other ways the new rules have changed the game. Batting averages may increase, and the league is hoping for more stolen bases. Managers and players have been forced to adapt to perhaps the biggest combined single-season changes in the modern history of the sport, and it’s impossible to pinpoint from one day of games exactly how that will play out.
But here’s one more metric from opening day: The number of hits per hour jumped up, after decades of mostly declining.
There were about 6.1 hits per hour during the first 11 games on opening day, compared with around 5.3 last year.