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Bill Dwyre, sports editor emeritus of the LA Times (unlike people who will just leave the paper after getting a nice chat with the folks from HR), bemoans the lack of doubleheaders played on holidays.
It's a piece waxing nostalgic on doubleheaders with some delightful anecdotes. But Dwyre forgets the one big reason why teams don't schedule doubleheaders unless they're forced to: they take a long time to play.
Unless you know ahead of time that you've got two Greg Maddux-like pitchers going for each team in each game and nobody is planning to score much, then you're in business. If not, you're likely looking at keeping people in the park for six to seven hours.
I could probably handle that and lot of people reading this wouldn't mind that much time at the stadium. But the average doesn't want to do it. I couldn't picture taking a child under the age of 13 to a baseball stadium for that length of time.
What if the Yankees and Red Sox had played a single admission doubleheader back on August 18, 2006. Game one lasted 3:55. Game two lasted 4:45. Neither game went into extra innings. Eight hours and forty minutes in total. If those games had been played right after another, it would have been a nine hour day. The fans don't get paid time and a half.
I've attended one doubleheader in my life. It was on June 26, 1988 in Oakland. The Twins swept the A's, winning the first game 11-0, and the second one 5-0. I sat in the right field bleachers with my then-girlfriend, a Minneapolis native and a big Twins fan. She made it through the first game and a couple of innings of the second before heading off to some concert that I recall having no interest in attending.
I do recall that it was a very long day. And there were a lot of very hammered people on the BART train on the way back to Berkeley. I look back at that doubleheader as more of an endurance test rather than a fun day at the park.
If MLB is concerened about money, rather than a double header being a straight 2-1, if you bought both games you would get a discount, not a full 2-1 but maybe a 50% reduction.
It was my second doubleheader. The first was a twi-night affair at Shea vs the Phils on August 14, 1964, a year in which the Mets played in 23 doubleheaders, 16 at then brand new Shea. They played three doubleheaders against the Phillies at Shea that year. My grandfather's fire company picked the wrong one to go to. If they'd chosen the doubleheader my best friend attended in June, I would've gotten to see Jim Bunning's perfect game, too.
It doesn't help the cause of doubleheaders that the way pitchers are used has changed so much. The Phils used three pitchers in the games I saw (Bunning threw a complete game 5-hitter), and the Mets used 6. The Mets and Rangers used 17. (Although in checking the boxes, I noticed that both second games were almost exactly the same length, 2:49 in '64 and 2:46 in '08. The first game in '64 was 2:28. They don't list a time for the 1st game on 6/15, but it started at 1:05 and ended around 4:30.)
But longer breaks between innings for commercials, more pitching changes, more offense (especially more walks), longer times between games, etc. make the thought of a big league DH pretty daunting.
But there's no question, it worked when games were a lot shorter than they are now.
First game was 11 innings, nearly 4 hours, the second was a brisk 2 and 1/4 hours.
I enjoyed it, except for the fact that our seats were in the sun and it was 90+ degrees. I flirted with heat exhaustion by the time I decided to move to the shady left-field seats.
I'm all in favor of a couple of traditional double-headers sprinkled through the season. I'd even be willing to consider the minor league rule of doing 7-inning games instead of full games.
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