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I'm at 39 games so far this year. One went 2:58 and aonther went 2:15. Both of those were 9 innings. One 8 inning game went 2:01. Everything that has finished without exra innings was finished in less than 2 hours, with the best being 1:13. (I carry a stopwatch in my back pocket. I start it after the pregame conference, and stop it when I walk out the gate after the game.)
In my experience, much of the extra lenght gets added to games between innings. Fed and OBR both specify one minute between innings. I've watched games where time between innings streaches to 3 or 4 minutes. Add 2 minutes between each inning of a Fed game and you just added 28 minutes to the game time.
I've watched umpires talking wih each other, talking to coaches, or even talking to fans while pitchers threw 9 or 10 warm-up pitches. I've watched as teams huddled before going out on the field on defense, and then were still alowed to take more than the allowed warm-ups. I've watched umpires allow batters to walk twenty feet up the third base line between pitches to take signals. I've watched as the game stopped while umpires called for balls to be thrown in after a foul ball.
All of thes things don't add a lot of time by themselves, but they do add up.
Game management includes time management. If the umpire hustles during the game, and encourages the coaches and players to hustle the spirt catches. If a team fails to get all the allowed warm up pitches in their one minute, stop the warm-ups and call for a batter. The next inning F1 and F2 will be sprinting to their positions to get their pitches. Coaches will appreciate what your are doing, and will begin to look forward to having you at their games. They don't want the 3 hour games either.
Get yourself a stop watch. Don't make a big show of using it(unless you are in a time limit situation in which case it will be the official clock).Use it as a tool to guage your time management and I'll wager that your game times will begin to go down.
Roger Greene
P.S. 1:30 JV game completed tonight. 6 full innings, visitors win 12-2.
RG
[Edited by Roger Greene on Apr 11th, 2002 at 07:24 PM]
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