The MLB average game time went up this season. Nine innings now run 2 hours, 42 minutes, an increase of 3 minutes and 43 seconds, and the reporting points at the new automated strike zone as a big part of the reason. That is the whole story in one line, and it is a more interesting line than it looks.
Back the math out and last season sat just a shade over 2:38. So we gave back not quite four minutes. Four minutes. You lose that much walking back to the car.
But direction matters more than size here, because for three straight years the direction only went one way.
Why did MLB game times go up in 2026?
Because for the first time since the pitch clock arrived, baseball added a stoppage instead of subtracting one. Every challenged pitch is a small ceremony: the tap, the pause, the whole ballpark turning to the board to watch a computer draw a rectangle around a baseball. It is maybe fifteen seconds. Multiply fifteen seconds by a full season of borderline sliders at the knees and you get your three minutes and forty three.
The honest read is that this is the cost of a feature, not the symptom of a bug. Nobody installed the system to save time. They installed it so the 3-2 pitch that decides a game gets decided correctly. That is a trade, and I think most of us would take it.
| MLB nine-inning average | Time |
|---|---|
| This season | 2:42 |
| Last season (backed out of the reported change) | roughly 2:38 |
| Year over year change | +3 min, 43 sec |
What the pitch clock era actually bought
Checked the almanac. In 2022, before the clock, the average nine-inning game ran 3 hours and 4 minutes. In 2023 it dropped to 2 hours and 40, a 24-minute haircut in one offseason, the single biggest one-year change to the rhythm of the sport in my lifetime. Games got shorter and, more importantly, they stopped feeling long, which is not the same statistic.
Against that, a four-minute bump is a rounding error. Baseball is still roughly twenty minutes faster than it was four summers ago. The people who spent a decade writing that the sport was unwatchably slow have mostly gone quiet, and they should, because the sport fixed it.
One beat of caution, though, and it is the reason this number is worth logging rather than shrugging at: time creeps. It crept for thirty years before anybody did anything about it. Nobody ever added twenty minutes to a baseball game in one go. They added four, then three, then five, and then one day it was 2022 and you were watching a Tuesday night game end after midnight. That's a tell worth remembering.
What comes next for the automated strike zone
October. That is the real stress test, and it is right here.
Postseason baseball already runs longer than the regular season by nature: more pitching changes, more mound visits, more full counts, more everything. Now put a challenge system on top of it in a spot where a called strike three can end a team's year. My guess is that we see challenges used later, slower, and far more theatrically than we did in May, and that the 15 seconds becomes a genuine moment rather than an interruption.
The Phillies punched the last NL ticket with a 7-3 win over Tampa Bay and head to Atlanta on Tuesday afternoon. Houston locked the AL's three seed at 81-81 with a 9-0 win over the A's, which is its own strange piece of history. Those are the games where the zone gets examined under a microscope, and where whatever the league decides to tweak this winter will get decided, fairly or not, by one image on one scoreboard.
What I'm watching next: the postseason game times, and whether the number that shows up in October looks like a system working or a system that needs a governor on it.