Recently a team executive was quoted saying that he thinks Major League Baseball should shorten its games to seven innings. But if there is any sport in the history of the world that is the most resistant to change, it’s baseball.
Even though the MLB just instituted a replay system for some close calls throughout the game, it does not exactly translate into altering the rules of the game. The baseball rulebook is a holy grail of sorts.
The executive argued that the games are often played too slowly and that baseball’s audience is aging by conducting a study that the younger generation of sports fans expect faster results. If the executive’s main concern is to speed up the game, then there are other ways to go about a rule change that does not dramatically alter the game.

Last season, the typical MLB game averaged 2 hours and 58 minutes, which was the highest average game time since the 2000 regular season. In that same year, the average NFL game lasted 3 hours and 12 minutes. Baseball may be a slower game, but it is not too long.

Shortening baseball games to seven innings surely reduces the wear and tear on a pitcher’s arm and may prevent many from having to undergo the dreaded Tommy John’s surgery. But shortening the game eliminates part of the mental strategy. Reducing the number of innings takes away a need for relief pitchers, set up men, and closers. Your average top-of-the-rotation starting pitcher probably throws between six and seven innings per start. And by eliminating the last two innings of every game, your chance of seeing a homerun—the play that everyone wants to see—will dip dramatically due to the fewer at-bats each player will receive. 
Baseball has undergone the least amount of change of any sport since its beginning. Baseball is reliant upon statistics because it’s how we compare players like Miguel Cabrera and Babe Ruth. We cannot make comparisons in football. We cannot show the similarities between Peyton Manning and Bart Starr because football has changed dramatically, even over the past 15 years. Statistics are important to baseball because it is the ultimate judgment for the induction into sports’ most exclusive shrine: The Baseball Hall of Fame.
The executive also argues that today there are less-capable pitchers in the league, which is simply not true seeing that starting pitchers have set records in the last several years for the number of no-hitters thrown in a single season. Besides, a game dominated by pitching is likely to move a lot quicker than one with a combined 20 hits and 15 runs. Pick your poison, Mr. Executive. You can have a long game (likely over three hours) with a better chance of scoring runs, or you can have a pitching duel reduce the total time and score less runs. Which do you prefer?