Whole lotta baseball

From Ars Technica (and while it’s not a story about baseball, it is is trying to use numbers to mean something)

It’s actually 162 regular season games a year for 30 teams which means, 2,430 games a year. That’s 32,805 hours of baseball based on the average length of a game lasting 162 minutes. The regular season is 185 days long, which equals 4,440 hours. So there’s more baseball than time.

These numbers struck me as wrong immediately.  If there are 32k hours of baseball in 4k hours of regular season, it means an average of eight baseball games being played at any hour of the day or night. Since there’s a maximum of 15 games being played simultaneously (because 30 teams), that would mean a full baseball schedule for an average of nearly 12 hours every day.  There is a lot of baseball, but not that much.  They don’t play at 3am, and they take occasional days off to travel.

So, let’s run the numbers:

• 162 games by 30 teams is 162×15 games, or 2430 games.
• Average game lasts 162 minutes. 162×2430 is 393660 minutes, or 393660/60=6561 hours.
• 185 day season is 185×24=4440 hours

The total hours of baseball seems off. In fact, it’s off by exactly a factor of five, suggesting the story was working with 12-minute hours for some reason.  With 6561 hours of baseball in a 4440 hour season, we’re looking at about 1.5 baseball games simultaneously, averaged over the season, which is more plausible.

While we’re at it, we might want to check on the 162 minutes/game since it’s a bit suspicious for two unrelated numbers in the same calculation to both be 162.  It’s right, at least for 2023, though it’s down from over 3 hours the previous season.