That baseball game revisited

[ffutures]

I now realise, watching the clip for about the fourth time and finally noticing the giant map in Mission Control, that the plane is off the East coast travelling North-East at the time of the shuttle launch. This means that I can ignore time zones, but it can't be Dodgers Stadium. I think that I'll say it's Gotham City Stadium.

OK, so when do baseball games usually start and roughly how long is a typical game?

Comments

[pauldrye.livejournal.com]

There are several common start times: 1:05pm, 1:30pm, 7:05pm and 7:30pm. You'll sometimes see games start at 4:05, especially if it's the second game of a double-header (which have become vanishingly rare in recent years, but were more and more common the further you go into the past). Televised weekday games often start at 8:05 pm, particularly if they're being televised nationally.

Major-league baseball has a stated goal of 2h45m as the average of all games, but this is honoured more in the breach (and became an issue because games were perceived as becoming excessively long in the latter part of the 90s and into the early 2000s). No-one would blink at a 3h or 3h30m game. A game under two hours is a whirlwind, but can happen with a pitcher who gains outs in effective style (i.e., many outs on balls-in-play, few in strikeouts).

[pauldrye.livejournal.com]

A historical chart of average game lengths from 1990 to 2002 can be found at the end of this article:

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/2003-03-05-faster-games_x.htm

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

OK, so this has to be early in the game - let's say it's definitely the first half.

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

There's plenty of exceptions. The Boston Red Sox have a game that starts at 11am on Patriot's Day, so that the crowd can let out in time to see the end of the Boston Marathon. As far as length goes, I've seen games run just a touch over 2 hours, but Red Sox v Yankees games rarely run under 4 hours long. If you need it to be longer, that isn't a problem: games can't end in a tie, so they just keep playing until somebody wins... which can run six hours or more.

Is there some reason it can't be Metropolis Stadium? Or one of the even more vaguely located imaginary cities like Central City?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Not really - anywhere on the East coast is probably fine (which does rule out Central City, presumably). The plane definitely comes down in a city near the coast - you can see the sea at some points as it's spiralling down, and it fits the mission control map I mentioned.