Average MLB game length

It turns out that as Americans have collectively decided to stretch their baseball games to nearly four hours apiece—adding roughly seventeen minutes per game over six years—they have also, with a kind of coordinated inevitability, begun getting bitten by snakes at almost exactly the same rate. One wonders if the snakes are simply waiting longer, growing impatient in the grass, finally deciding that if humans are going to take this long to do anything, including watch sports, they might as well strike.

The actual culprit here is almost certainly the summer itself. Baseball seasons grow hotter and longer; people spend more time outdoors during peak snake season (May through September), hiking, camping, gardening, generally doing the sorts of things that snakes find objectionable when humans show up unannounced. Meanwhile, game length has increased due to more pitching changes, more between-inning entertainment, more everything—all the small delays that accumulate like lint in a dryer. Between 2010 and 2016, average game time rose from about 2 hours 54 minutes to 3 hours 11 minutes; emergency department visits for snake bites, a relatively rare event, fluctuate with seasonal outdoor activity and population growth, perhaps three to four thousand cases per year across the entire country.

What we are witnessing is not causation but the gentle hand of a much larger variable—summer itself, that season when humans and snakes alike become more active, more present in the same spaces. The correlation teaches us something quieter than we expected: that sometimes two completely unrelated behaviors will dance together simply because they share a hidden partner. Maybe that's enough.