NEW YORK (AP) — Major League Baseball's average game time has slowed during the first week of the season and was back over 3 hours. The average time of a nine-inning game was 3:04 through the first 79 games of this season, according to STATS. That is up 8 minutes from a 2:56 average for the first 79 games last year. MLB introduced new pace-of-game initiatives last season, and the average time dropped from 3:03 during the first full week in 2014.