Average MLB game has only 14 minutes of actual action.

This past summer we heard a lot of talk from American sports fans saying things along the lines of "soccer is boring because there is no action." The next time you hear that from someone, just send them this Wall Street Journal article. This study shows that the average Major League Baseball game only has 14 minutes of actual action.

The stopwatch would start when a pitcher lifted his leg to begin his pitching motion. The timing would stop when the ball hit the catcher's mitt or, if it was put in play, when the presiding umpire made a call or the players all stopped moving (pickoff attempts and steals were also counted as action).

The result is that during these games, there was a nearly identical amount of action: about 14 minutes. To put that in context, that's about 10.9% of the total broadcast time (excluding commercials). It's a fraction of the roughly 88 minutes the players were shown standing around between plays, nearly 45% more than the 10 minutes of replays that are shown and almost four times as much as the cameras show players lounging in the dugout.

Seriously, 14 minutes of actual game play during the average Major League Baseball game. A lot of us will stay up until past 1 AM Eastern on most nights during the baseball playoffs thanks to games that take close to 3 hours to finish. 

 This comes on the heels of an earlier study which reported that the average NFL game only had 11 minutes of action. 

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