So Many Hours of Baseball... in Chart Form!

The above image is taken from Flip Flop Flyball and is a chart of how many hours of baseball each team played during the 2011 regular season. If you haven't been to the web site before and you love baseball and/or infographs, you need to check it out. The creator of this material is a British man named Craig Robinson who came to the game late and is a Yankees fan, because why not? Aside from loving the fact that a person from a largely baseball-less culture could fall so strongly for a foreign game, I love Robinson's approach to the game. He has a wholly unique perspective and sees the games in ways I'd never dreamed. 

This post isn't really about pimping for a person I've never met. Robinson created the above graph (for a bigger version, click here because I haven't linked to his page enough) and it got me thinking. Unsurprisingly, the Red Sox and Yankees are at the top of the list with most hours played (a bright note knowing that we played more hours than anyone since the season ended prematurely... at least we got to watch more baseball during the season! Yeah, that's not working for me, either). They play a particular brand of baseball in which taking pitches is de rigueur and the offense scores a lot of runs. Any fan of these teams can tell you that when they face off against each other, you can expect a four to five hour game.

But what I find particularly interesting about this chart is that there seems to be no correlation between record and game length. The best team in the American League (by record), the Yankees, rates at second most in hours played yet the best team in the National League (as well as overall), the Phillies, are fourth from the least number of hours played. The rest of the playoff teams fall randomly between.

There's no real logic to any of it. Bad teams might play shorter games because they can't score runs. Then again, maybe they play longer games because they can't make outs. And the reverse holds true. It would be interesting to see if the bad teams with good pitching and bad offenses play shorter games than bad teams with decent offenses and poor pitching. I'd also be interested to see a companion graph that charts how many pitches each team threw throughout the year and how many their opponents through against them to see if there's a correlation. Hmm... maybe I am starting to think a little outside the box.

Robinson also made an informative and amusing chart for the eight teams in the playoffs (now seven... sorry Rays...) for Grantland.