Oh, Just Sit Back and Relax

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

I am a fan of the Portland, Oregon-based Internet baseball writer Rob Neyer and a long-standing reader of his work online.  Rob wrote for ESPN and other outlets, and now is associated with Fox Sports, for which he does frequent baseball pieces.

In his most recent piece, Rob covers some changes done in the Arizona Fall League as experiments to try to speed up the pace of the game.  The AFL is a post-season league to which teams send some of their best prospects to get some seasoning.  It is also a laboratory where Baseball tries out some rule changes before possibly implementing them at the big-league level.

I'm really ambivalent here.  I know some of the suggestions, like cutting time between pitches with no one on, would probably be a boon to the game but, as Rob noted, the average game time in the AFL experiment was only shrunk by about ten minutes.  Meh.

Of course, whether we even should be trying to shrink game times is in question.  The NFL, for example, has stretched its start times of Sunday later games to 4:30pm Eastern instead of 4:00pm, apparently because they can't get the 1:00pm games done in time.  Three hours to play a game that has precisely one hour of timed action seems a bit much, but no one complains.

And ... I believe they're not complaining for the same reason that Baseball shouldn't get too worked up about its own game length -- people who are fans enjoy sitting in front of the TV watching the spectacle.  Granted that the elapsed time of baseball games has gradually expanded; but some of that is the unavoidable consequence of gargantuan TV rights contracts, which require a lot of advertising spots to pay the piper.

I don't know if I'm alone in this, but I truly appreciate the leisurely, contemplative and cerebral pace of the major-league baseball game.  I can sit back and relax, consider the options and use the commercial breaks for the beer runs and bathroom trips that God intended when He inspired Abner Doubleday to create the game.  If the alternative is rushing pitches, freezing hitters in the batters box and otherwise affecting the game, I'm not likely to be a big fan of such changes.

Life has enough to rush through.  Baseball is a different game.  Relax.  Have a beer.

Copyright 2014 by Robert Sutton