last day of the season

Seems to me that baseball's last game of the season is being pushed back farther and farther every year.  Wednesday's World Series match up was postponed a day due to rain, meaning the 2011 season is guaranteed to last until October 27.

With the help of Baseball Almanac, I decided to take a look back at the final day of the baseball season from 1915 through 2010 in 5-year increments.  By final day, I mean the final game of the World Series.

click on table to enlarge the data

As you can see, the last game of the season has generally been before the midway point of October from 1915 to roughly 1970.  There is a lot of data to dig through.  A better analysis would've been to look at the first World Series in 1903.  It is not depicted in the chart above, but the last date was October 13.

Early on, the World Series ended earlier in the calendar year simply because there were two teams in the playoffs.  The winner of the National League would play the winner of the American League in the World Series.

Starting in 1969, each league was divided into two divisions.  The winner of the divisional match ups would then play each other in the World Series.  The last game of the World Series was now at least a week or more later in almost all instances from the previous era.

In 1995, baseball had implemented a system where there were three divisions per league, plus a wild card.  This scenario added another round of playoffs.  As you can see in 2010, the final game of the season was into November.

With the data presented above, you can see the 3 distinct eras of baseball.  One going from 1903-1968, another from 1969 - 1993, and the final going from 1994 - present.  In the meantime, there is talk of a 2nd wildcard joining the playoffs in 2012 and beyond.

Finally, in looking at the box score, I thought it would be interesting to glance at the time it took to play each of the World Series games in each of the eras.

Although you can blame TV for making games long, the specialization of the game, and the mannerisms of the current ballplayer has added roughly more than an hour to each game over a 100-year timespan.