Why do baseball games take so long?

Since people are mentioning other sports, for an analytical study on golf's pace of play, see Golf's Pace of Play Bible, by the founder of the three/45 Golf Association -- http://www.three45golf.org/?r=no -- and a colleague at Columbia Business School. They found that studies showed that the current slow pace of play is the biggest obstacle to enjoying and growing the game. They analyzed golf's play with business operations analytics, like queueing theory.

I thought people liked to play golf to relax, but waiting for others isn't relaxing. It turns out that speeding the game through a few changes improves the experience for everyone -- not just players, but the club as well. They talk about principles everyone can do to improve the pace.

Though my wife says she'd be happier to go to games if they were just about six innings long, I don't mind. I enjoy the atmosphere, particularly at Wrigley Field where there's no attempt to keep everyone distracted every second with per-player at-bat song themes and audience participation games during every inning break. The game is designed to be deliberately paced and reflective. Enjoy it for what it is. Pitching and hitting will ebb and flow as it always has. Strategies will change. But the pace is fine.

Also American made "documentaries".

I cannot watch a doco made by Americans, its infuriating. Maybe 13 minutes 9 seconds worth of content stretched over 55 minutes of excruciatingly repeated cut scenes of the same damn clip over and over and over again. I once made a point of counting them. The same content, exactly the same footage shown 6 times, I quit watching about then.

Now compare that to anything by David Attenborough.

Baseball seems very fast paced when compared to cricket, a game that can stretch over 5 days with routine breaks for lunch and tea.

same of this stuff applies to tennis as well...there's too much time spend between serves with all the little habits each player has, or using towel etc., plus the break every two games !? It's hard to even consider watching a full 5 set game.

Refreshing to hear somebody talking about too much dead space filling entertainment. Contrast vs reality-TV and game shows where the pace is deliberately dragged down to a crawl.

Football is a much worse offender. The amount of time spent waiting around just goes to show how it was perfectly made to generate TV advertising revenue.