When the Nationals beat the Rangers, 2-0, on June 6, 2025, in Washington, it was the fastest finish for a home game in team history. Michael Soraka pitched the best game of his short tenure in D.C., yielding two hits in six shutout innings. Brad Lord, Jose Ferrer and Kyle Finnegan held the Rangers hitless the rest of the way. Finnegan picked up his 18th save.
The one-hour, 50-minute, shutout matched the time it took the Nats to lose, 2-0, in Pittsburgh on Sept. 14, 2023. With the home teams winning, neither game had a bottom of the ninth, typical of games that last less than two hours.
Fans were on their way home at 8:35 p.m. after the 2025 game, thanks to the 6:45 start time on weeknights instituted in 2023. The previous start time was a more commonplace 7:05.
For the Rangers, June 6 was their fastest game in more than 40 years. Texas lost on Sept. 30, 1984, to the California Angels, 1-0 at home. That game went one hour and 49 minutes, per Baseball-Reference. Mike Witt threw perfect game, winning 1-0.
The Natiionals aren’t the only team that has moved up the start times for weeknight games. This season, nearly 63 percent of all weeknight games are starting before 7 p.m. local time.
An overall decline in the length of major league games is a direct result of pace-of-play changes implemented in 2023. The changes, familiar by now, included enforcement of pitch- and batter-timers, limits on pick-off throws to first base and the requirement that relief pitchers face three batters or finish an inning.
To a traditionalist like me, those changes, along with the rule limiting drastic infield shifts, haven’t fundamentally altered the game. (The “Manfred man” ghost runner in extra innings is another matter, however.)
Times for nine-inning games in 2025 have ticked up slightly through August to 2:38, from 2:36 for all of 2024. That was the shortest average game time in the past 40 seasons and is down from a record 3:10 as recently as 2021. It’s hard to argue against that.
The fastest game this season – an hour and 49 minutes – came on May 17 when the Cardinals beat the Royals, 1-0, in Kansas City. The Cards’ quick win was especially noteworthy as they had to play the bottom of the ninth on the road. That game was a minute longer than the Sept. 27, 2024, game in which the Cubs beat the Reds, 1-0, at Wrigley Field, the fastest finish for any game since 2010.
The June 2, 2010, quickie in Detroit lasted just an hour and 44 minutes, according to baseball stats guru Sarah Langs, with the Tigers beating the Indians behind what should have been Armando Galarraga’s perfect game.
As a result, nearly 90 percent of those games end before 10 p.m. – and more than 60 percent are completed before 9:30 p.m. That’s more fan-friendly for families with school children. Accordingly, weeknight attendance has increased throughout both leagues, pushing overall attendance to a seven-year high in 2024, despite concerns about inflation. Of the 30 teams, 21 are again on a pace this season to draw more than two million fans.
The Nationals, despite another likely last-place finish in the N.L. East, fell just short of two million tickets sold, with an average crowd of 24,287 fans per game in 2024, which ranked 22nd among MLB teams. Their average attendance this season is up more 600 a game over the ’24 figure for a team that will have to finish strong to win as many games as the past two seasons. Heck, if you’re going to finish last, at least make it quick.
Of course, low-scoring, well-pitched, games before the pitch clock always tended to be completed quickly. Fan like me appreciate records that stand the test of time. So it’s worth noting that the fastest MLB game since the wild-card era began in 1994 happened way back in 2005.
On April 16 of that season in Chicago, the White Sox beat the Mariners, 2-1, in an hour and 39 minutes. Complete games by both pitchers and a couple of solo homers helped move things along. You can look it up with a few clicks on Retrosheet, that amazing and underappreciated resource.
A version of this appeared in Here’s the Pitch, the daily online post of the Internet Baseball Writers Association on Sept. 6, 2025.
Washington baseball history 