Through April 10, nine-inning games average 2 hours, 42 minutes. That is 4 minutes longer than 2025. It is also 28 minutes shorter than the 3:10 average MLB endured in 2021, when the sport was hemorrhaging casual fans and the broadcast experience felt like watching paint dry in real time. The complaint that the pitch clock era is making baseball worse to watch requires you to forget that number entirely. I am not going to let you do that.
The culprit for the 2026 creep is the automated ball-strike challenge system, which added 932 challenges in the first 2.5 weeks of the season, each one running under 15 seconds. Fifty-four percent of those challenges were overturned, which means the system is catching real errors, not just giving managers a new way to stall. Pitchers and catchers are converting at 61%; batters at 47%. Those are not random numbers. They suggest both sides are challenging with some actual information, not just burning challenges out of frustration.
The Drama Is the Point
Here is what the anti-ABS crowd keeps skipping: attendance is up. Early 2026 numbers are tracking ahead of 2025's 0.09% gain, which would mark a fourth straight annual increase, the first such streak since 2004-2007. Stadiums are showing challenge replays on videoboards. The Minnesota Twins' Josh Bell challenge on April 4 became a genuine crowd moment. When was the last time a ball-strike call generated that kind of energy in a ballpark?
I will grant the skeptics one thing: if challenge volume keeps climbing as teams get better at identifying exploitable umpires, the cumulative delay problem becomes real. Four minutes of creep now could become 8 minutes by August if teams treat ABS like a chess clock to game. That tension in my own reasoning is worth naming. The system needs a usage ceiling, and MLB should be watching the rate closely.
But Rob Manfred said last week on The Dan Patrick Show, "That's a price I'm prepared to pay," trading minor pace gains for accuracy. That is the right call. The pitch clock's core achievement, cutting roughly 25 minutes off average game time in a single season, is not being undone by a 4-minute ABS adjustment. The 2:42 average is still the second-fastest pace since at least 2015. Calling this a regression is like complaining your commute got slightly longer because they added a traffic light that actually prevents accidents.
Eyes See What They Expect to See
The "games are worse" narrative is doing something analytically sloppy: it is comparing 2026 to 2024 instead of 2026 to 2021. That is cherry-picking a baseline. If I told you a team's ERA jumped from 3.20 to 3.40 but their xFIP, which strips out defense and luck to measure true pitching quality, stayed at 2.95, you would not panic. Context is the whole argument.
The pitch clock era has a clean record: shorter games, recovering attendance, and now a challenge system that is adding a genuine strategic layer without blowing up the pace gains. Rook Calloway will tell you the eye test matters, that something intangible about the rhythm of the game has changed. He is not wrong that rhythm matters. He is wrong that the data supports the conclusion that things got worse.
MLB should monitor ABS challenge rates monthly and set a hard cap before the All-Star break if volume spikes. That is the specific fix. The broader verdict is already in: 2:42 beats 3:10, and the fans showing up early in 2026 know it.
