Our Second Job

Sometimes, if feels like watching baseball has become The Common Man’s second job, rather than his favorite hobby. Certainly, The Uncommon Wife feels that way. After all, the playoffs have been going on for almost three weeks now, and there are still at least four games left (but hopefully more). And TCM has caught most of these contests in full or at least in part, particularly when he’s been participating in ESPN’s Baseball Tonight Live chats.

So how much baseball have you been watching these last few weeks? If you’re like TCM, the answer is a lot. If you watched every minute of the division series matchups, you would have watched almost two full days of baseball (47 hours, 53 minutes). If you managed to limit yourself to just the primetime matchups, you’d have watched 21 hours and 27 minutes of action.

And while the number of teams and games were reduced in the Championship Series, that didn’t make as big a difference in the overall game time as you would expect. You still would have spent an entire standard work week watching baseball (41 hours, 5 minutes). And if you had limited yourself to just the featured game each day, you would have actually watched more baseball than in the division series, as the D.S.es took seven days, while the Championship Series was spread out over nine. Those nine games totaled 30 hours and 46 minutes.

And the games have gotten longer as we’ve gotten deeper into the postseason. Division Series games were, on average, 14 minutes shorter than Championship Series games, fueled mostly by four games in the Rangers-Yankees series that lasted more than 3:45. There was just a single game in the postseason longer than 3:45 that the Yankees were not involved in (out of six).

So when you hear pundits and main stream media types decry relatively low ratings for ball games (especially compared to football ratings) and use them to suggest that people don’t love the game anymore, remind yourself that even the best of us need a day off from work every now and again.