BOSTON — The analytics crowd isn’t accepting blame for baseball’s big slowdown.

“I plead not guilty,” statistics pioneer Bill James said on Friday. “I don’t have nothin’ to do with this.”

As baseball games get longer and less action-packed, the sport has been looking for ways to reverse the fan-unfriendly trend. Among the biggest targets: infield shifts, and batters who swing for the fences — both tactics encouraged by analytics.

But James said the trend toward inaction predated new philosophies like pursuing the “three true outcomes” — home runs, strikeouts and walks — that drag out the games.

“I don’t see the causal link between the things that we do and the aesthetic problems in the game,” James said.

While baseball games hovered around 2 hours, 30 minutes for much of the post-WWII era, the length began creeping upward in 1979 and hit 3 hours in 2012; 3:16 so far this season.