The Yankees And Rays Played The Longest Baseball Game Ever On Monday Night
The 1-0 win by the Rays took 3 hours and 28 minutes, the longest 9-inning, 1-0 game in MLB history according to the Elias Sports Bureau.
In 1943, the Washington Senators and Chicago White Sox completed a 1-0 game in just 1 hour and 29 minutes, the fastest known 9-inning, 1-0 game in MLB history. The Rays and Yankees took two hours longer to accomplish the same feat.
If the two games had started at the same time, the Rays and Yankees would have still been in the bottom of the fourth inning as the Senators and White Sox were recording their final out.
What is absurd about the Yankees-Rays game is that there was that nothing out of the ordinary happened. There were eight pitchers used, but only three of the pitching changes occurred in the middle of the inning.
There were no replay challenges. In fact the only substantial delay was the ejection of Yankees third baseman Chase Headley during his at bat in the seventh inning.
However, there was a lot of this, which we had to speed up to fit into a GIF. In this particular sequence, it took Carlos Beltran 12 seconds to adjust his batting gloves and get back into the batter's box while everybody else waited.
Many believe the biggest task for commissioner-in-waiting Rob Manfred will be dealing with the pace of the play in MLB games. Maybe he needs to start with the Yankees and the Rays.