Marty Brennaman who is in the broadcaster wing of the MLB hall of fame has called BS on these changes. When he started as the Reds radios announcer at the beginning of the Big Red Machine era (early 1970s) there were 90 seconds between half innings for commercials and pitcher warm ups. When he left the broadcast booth a few years ago, that had expended to 150-240 seconds depending on what network was TV broadcasting the game.

That is anywhere between 15 and 30 minutes of added game time. This does not include the commercial spots guaranteed for other pitching changes.

MLB will clutch its pearls but they will not reduce the dead time between half innings or pitching changes that generates revenue. That is the real reason most games (not Yankees/Red Sox games) are so much longer than they were 20-30 years ago.

As with most parts of MLB -- follow the money and you will find the root cause.

but the breaks for local/regional games seem shorter.

You wonder what MLB will do with all that extra time. I bet they sneak in several more commercials.

MLB's aim IMO is to perceptively change the game so it seems to "move faster" and is "more entertaining." The commercial breaks will increase in length as you suggest but the on-field action will seem to speed up.

I'll tell you where they got this from -- extensive focus groups comprised of Millennials and Generation Zs who whine about baseball being "boring."

That's why we have a universal DH now, why we'll have pitch clocks next year, and sometime in the regrettable future a limitation on defensive shifts, increasing the distance from the pitcher's mound to home plate, and larger fucking base pads.