World Series 2016: Cubs, Indians took 4 hours to play Game 2; that's not a bad thing

Written By Jesse Spector
(Getty Images)

CLEVELAND — The Cubs went 25,951 days between wins in the World Series, having last been victorious in Game 6 of the 1945 Fall Classic. It only seemed like Game 2 of this year’s clash between Chicago and Cleveland took that long.

The Cubs’ 5-1 triumph took a standard nine innings. Despite dire forecasts and rain that seemed imminent all night, there were only a few drops at the end before the skies opened up while the players were showering and getting ready to head to the Windy City, validating Major League Baseball’s decision to shift the start time of Game 2 to 7:08 p.m. ET from its originally scheduled 8:08 first pitch.

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Somehow, it still took 4 hours, 4 minutes to play a baseball game that was unremarkable outside of the fact it was the World Series between two teams with a combined 176 years of championship droughts.

“They had good time of possession,” Cleveland first baseman Mike Napoli said. “They ran the ball down our throats tonight. My feet are pretty sore. Hey, they did what they had to do. They scrapped away runs, had good ABs from people with runners in scoring position.”

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Chicago did spend a lot of time on offense, especially in the top of the fifth inning, which took 27 minutes as the Cubs scored three times and Cleveland made one of the night’s five mid-inning pitching changes. But it’s not like the Cubs have a habit of playing particularly long games. The average time of a major league game this year was 3:04. The Cubs averaged 3:05. Cleveland averaged 3:03.

So, what in the world happened on Wednesday night, and what does baseball need to do about it?

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The first part of that question is surprisingly easy to answer. A nine-inning game with only six runs scored does not take more than four hours without multiple factors being responsible.

The one that Major League Baseball will not do anything about, because it directly impacts the bottom line, is the longer time granted for commercial breaks during nationally televised games. Still, that’s only a few minutes. And there were five extra commercial breaks for those mid-inning pitching changes, two by Chicago and three by Cleveland.

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A lot of the issues Wednesday revolved around performance, specifically by the pitchers, of whom there were 10. Those pitchers, during the regular season, combined to face 4,025 batters, throwing strikes on 62.9 percent of their 15,906 pitches, with plate appearances that averaged 3.95 pitches. In Game 2, those same pitchers combined to throw strikes on 59.4 percent of their 357 pitches, with plate appearances that averaged 4.41 pitches.

Six of the 10 pitchers used, including both starters, had longer plate appearances against them than usual. And six of the 10 pitchers used — not the same six, but again, including both starters — had worse control. The at-bats against Trevor Bauer lasted a full pitch longer than his season average, while Jake Arrieta, usually a 63.1 percent strike thrower, got strikes on only 55 of his 98 pitches, a 56.1 percent clip.

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“(Corey) Kluber was in the zone more,” said the Cubs' Ben Zobrist, who went 2 for 4 with an RBI triple, referring to Cleveland’s Game 1 starter, who threw strikes on 67.0 percent of his pitches, compared to a 60.9 percent rate for Bauer. “We had an easier time letting go of the ones that were on the edge of the plate from Bauer early in the game. That’s definitely part of just getting his pitch count up in the game. And when we’re able to do that, you can kind of feel our offense really feeding off of that, and we believe we’re going to break through eventually.”

That was exactly what happened. The weakest part of the pitching staff for pretty much every team is middle relief. Cleveland’s corps is good, but Chicago wants to see relievers who are not Andrew Miller and Cody Allen. So they did what the majority of successful teams this century have done — grinded out at-bats against the starter, drove up his pitch count, did a little damage and got into that soft underbelly of the bullpen. It was against Zach McAllister, who relieved Bauer, and a much-wilder-than-usual Bryan Shaw that the Cubs broke the game open.

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The reason that all those classic Yankees-Red Sox games took so long isn’t that they were giving each other dramatic soap opera stares from across the diamond, even if that’s how it came across on Fox broadcasts in the 2000s. It’s that they were doing the exact same thing, wearing down starters as legendary as Pedro Martinez and relievers as immortal as Mariano Rivera.

After throwing 51 pitches in the first two innings as he struggled with his command, Bauer got the first two outs of the third inning of what was then a 1-0 game on four pitches. He got to an 0-2 count on Anthony Rizzo, and was on the verge of getting through the third on fewer than 60 pitches, putting himself in position to get through five innings and hand things off to the heart of Cleveland’s bullpen.

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Bauer didn’t throw Rizzo another strike. Zobrist singled on the third pitch he saw. Kyle Schwarber then singled home Rizzo on a 3-0 pitch. Pitching coach Mickey Callaway came out to the mound to talk to Bauer, more time elapsing, and by the time the right-hander struck out Javier Baez on three pitches, his total was at 71 in a 2-0 game. That set in motion the chain of pitching changes that followed, because Terry Francona wasn’t going to let Bauer face the top of Chicago’s lineup a third time, and when it came around again with two outs in the fourth, Bauer was done.

(Getty Images)

Terry Francona takes the ball from Trevor Bauer, the first of many pitching changes in Game 2. (Getty Images)

Those extra pitches Bauer threw were extra minutes, and the game moves more slowly when there are runners on base, even when Dodgers reliever and human temporal anomaly Pedro Baez isn’t involved. Game 2 featured runners on base constantly. There were 13 hits, 13 time-consuming walks and two more batters who reached on errors.

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Add in the 43-degree night and the damp Cleveland air, and there were more instances than usual of pitchers taking time to lick their fingers or blow on their hands, more adjustments of batters’ cold-weather gear, more existential malaise about life choices that would lead one to spend four hours outdoors on a 43-degree night in the damp Cleveland air.

OK, maybe not the last one, because to the players, it didn’t seem like the game took that long. But it was cold.

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“For me, I’m getting loose, trying to stay warm, especially being so cold,” said Cleveland outfielder Rajai Davis, who pinch-hit in the seventh inning and played the final 53 minutes. “I’m really in and out and up and down, so it kind of flew by for me.”

The game did not fly by for Kris Bryant, who went 1 for 5 with a run scored for the Cubs. As Bryant was asked about the length of the game, a Major League Baseball official cringed, which tells you something about how the powers that be feel about the subject. But Bryant had the perfect answer.

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“This is playoff baseball, so it’s going to take longer,” he said. “There’s more strategy to it, more pitching changes, longer commercials. It all plays into it. But if you’re a true fan and you love the game, you can watch baseball forever. For me, being a player and loving this game, I can play all day long. I don’t care how long it takes.”

That’s how it should be, because one of the best parts of baseball is that there is no time limit. Could we stand to see pitch clocks? Sure. But changing fundamental aspects of the game is not a necessary consideration.

All things considered, Wednesday night wasn’t so bad. The game ended at 11:12 Eastern, satisfying for prime-time TV coverage. If there’s a change that MLB ought to make, it should be to start the games earlier on a regular basis, because if you don’t want them to end late — and it would be a mistake to make sweeping changes for what is really a cosmetic issue — that’s the easiest answer, not to mention one that would help address that other, more important problem for baseball: getting the game in front of young eyeballs, no matter what time it is.

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