Statistically Significant?
 

While I know as officials we have a lot to do on the field/court, and most of the time there is something going on for us, last night, on NBC's Nightly News, Brian Williams reported that in your average baseball game there is only 17:58 of actual "Baseball Action," the rest of the time is just standing around.

For football, he said it was just 11 minutes.

I don't recall him siting the survey source or a definition of "Action", and I'm imagining he's probably talking from a fan's standpoint.

There was a story in the Wall Steet Journal about this a couple of years ago. They taped and then timed some games and described what they included as "action". They also broke down the rest of the three-hour telecast into things such as commercials, fan shots, replays etc.

Here's the article that bob's referring to:

Football Games Have 11 Minutes of Action - WSJ.com

I think if you included time when plays were possible or threatened -- which was not included in what's cited by the WSJ article -- baseball would be even farther ahead of football. Of course they'd both be way behind more continuous action games typified by soccer, or racing contests not held in heats, and way ahead of target games like tenpin bowling, archery, or golf.

Hockey is another exciting game to watch in person. The number of line changes while play continues and possibility of continuous action is a lot of fun.

Hockey, like other sports though, most especially football and the last few minutes of a basketball game - fall prey to TV timeouts and commercials, which KILL the game in person.

And watching on TV.

Depends on your definition of "action" when it comes to soccer. I've witnessed some matches on television (no, I've never seen a match above the high school level in person, and that's only because I played the game in high school) that rivaled a day at the golf course... :D