As the major league playoffs continue on into the World Series, there is lots of talk—complaining, really—about the lengthening time it takes to play, and therefore watch, a baseball game. The average time of a baseball game is now three hours and five minutes. I don’t know if the average time of a baseball game was even tracked in the good/bad old days of my youth, but I remembered games with fast-working pitchers on the mound—Bob Gibson, Fergie Jenkins—that were completed at just under two hours, roughly the length of a movie. The young today seem especially put off by the slowness of baseball; the average age of the baseball television audience is 57, with only 7 percent of its viewers under the age of 18.
Worrisome, all this, especially if one owns a baseball franchise or even if one has an emotional investment in baseball such that one wishes it not to lose its place as the national pastime and dwindle into a game enjoyed chiefly by codgers. Former baseball commissioner Bud Selig was sufficiently worried to have formed a committee composed of baseball owners and executives, general managers and field managers to come up with ways to speed up the game without, the hope is, changing its essential character. The new commissioner, Rob Manfred, is even more intent on shortening the game. Thus far the only change put into effect is that teams no longer have to go through the paces of an intentional walk by purposely throwing four bad pitches; the intentional walk can now quickly be executed by the manager’s simply signaling for it from the dugout, though the time saved by this reform is minimal, less than a minute, I’d guess. Talk is also being bruited about reducing the number of pitching changes allowed in a game, about shortening the time permitted a pitcher between pitches (it is now 12 seconds, although the rule is notoriously unenforced), about the number of trips a catcher can make to the mound to confer with his pitcher, about limiting the times a batter is allowed to step out of the batter’s box between pitches and, who can say, about not permitting an outfielder, in his lonely isolation, to adjust his crotch.
Boredom is the great enemy here. Too many people now find baseball, because of its slowness, tedious in the extreme. Why aren’t I—a man easily bored by unstylishly written books, dull lectures, misfired TV sitcoms, most theater, much of the news, and all politicians—also bored by baseball? Far from being bored by the sport, the older I get the more I have come to appreciate the genius inherent in the game. As a man who has had the sports disease from the age of 6, I now find baseball easily the most intricate, the most pleasing, the best of all sports.
In what other sport can a last-place team beat a first-place team three or four games in a row and sweep a series? (In basketball or football, where superior skill if not brute force wins every time out, this is unlikely to happen even once.) In what other sport is tension so extended as in baseball, where in a playoff or World Series or even midseason game a pitcher, in late innings in a tied game or with a one-run lead with the bases loaded and no one out, is in a fix—a fix that could take him as long as 20 or more tense minutes to work out of or that could prove his team’s undoing? In what other sport is what not Yogi Berra but Aristotle called peripeteia, or reversal of fortune, so frequent as in baseball, where a single error or an unexpected injury can close down a team’s hopes for a season or the acquisition of a new player in a trade completely revive its prospects? In what other sport is there a season of similar length—162 games—which over this longish haul allows for impressive comebacks after poor beginnings and which requires an almost philosophical perspective to accept rises and falls on the part of players and fans alike, while providing, for roughly seven months, nearly everyday entertainment for its devotees?
No other sport is so intricate in its maneuverings as baseball. The former manager Tony La Russa, in George Will’s excellent 1990 book Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, posited eight different strategies available to a manager with men on first and third and one out. To grasp the richness of baseball’s complications, its language, its arcana, one needs to have grown up with it, to have played it as a kid. At a Cubs-Dodgers game, I once attempted to explain baseball to Bonnie Nims, the wife of the poet John Frederick Nims, and at the end of my six-inning-long instruction, I asked if everything was becoming clear to her. “I think so,” she said. “I believe I understand just about everything you’ve said except for this concept of ‘the out.’ ”
Baseball may also be the last major American sport in which one doesn’t have to be freakishly large—a 300-pound lineman or 250-pound running back in football, a 6-foot-10 power forward or 6-foot-5 guard in basketball—to succeed. Tony Gwynn, the greatest hitter in the game over the past 40 years, was a pudge who probably couldn’t have qualified as the mascot for any major college athletic program.
For the sports-minded, as for the politically minded, there is a spectrum ranging from conservative to radical, and it is not uncommon for a radical in politics to be archconservative in the realm of sports, and sometimes vice versa. Sports radicals do not in the least mind changes in their sport—ranging from designated hitters in baseball, to shot clocks in basketball, to coaches’ red-flag challenges of referees’ calls in football. Sports conservatives would like everything in the games they love to stay forever the same. Sports conservatives, for example, loathe the American League designated hitter rule in baseball to this day, even though it has been in practice since 1973, a full 44 years. Sports radicals think improvement through change always possible and usually desirable. I’m surprised no one among them has yet proposed solving the problem of the lengthening of baseball games in a single stroke by reducing all games to five innings, thereby allowing everyone to return home early to his video games and Reddit.
Change there has of course been in baseball, undeniable and irrecoverable. As was recently argued in the Wall Street Journal by Brian Costa and Jared Diamond, baseball has become ever more analytic in recent decades, in ways that invariably extend the length of the game. By analytic, they mean driven and controlled by sabermetrics, the study of stats that measure in-game action. The whole business probably began when someone discovered that, statistically at least, left-handed pitchers do better against left-handed hitters, and right-handed pitchers do better against right-handed hitters. This paved the way for more pitching changes and differing batting orders to face either right- or left-handed pitchers. In the 1920s there were pitchers who pitched both games of a doubleheader. As recently as the 1940s, relief pitchers were a rarity. In our day, if a pitcher can get through six innings, he is thought to have had a successful outing. So specialized has the game become that pitchers make a living—often a handsome one—as one-inning (the seventh, the eighth) specialists.
As with pitching, so with other aspects of baseball: Change and complication has made for longer games. More and more teams have devised defensive shifts for opposing batters, which in turn causes the batters to disdain hitting ground balls and instead to swing for the fences. This past year there were record numbers of home runs and strikeouts, both making for a longer time at bat. Costa and Diamond note that on average this season the ball was put into play only every 3 minutes 48 seconds. A batter who fouls off six or seven pitches can be in the batter’s box for five full minutes and more.
Then, of course, there is the matter of the influence of money in lengthening games. When a journalist approached the late television sports producer Don Ohlmeyer saying he had a question for him, Ohlmeyer replied: “If the question is about sports, the answer is money.” Striking out, once a matter of disgrace in baseball, is now of negligible concern—negligible, that is, if a player can hit 30 or more home runs during a season. The big money goes for the dingers. A Chicago Cubs outfielder named Kyle Schwarber this past season in 422 times at bat struck out 150 times, but he hit 30 home runs. Yankees rookie Aaron Judge was at bat 542 times and 208 of those times he struck out, but over the season hit 52 homers. No one is going to remember those strikeouts. His agent will lead with that 52 homers statistic when negotiating a vastly enriched renewal of Judge’s contract, which he is sure to acquire.
Staying with the subject of the influence of money, a sports Marxist might argue that the most efficient way to reduce the time it takes to play major league baseball is to cut down on, if not eliminate, commercials. I have recently timed the commercials between half-innings at baseball games, and they run to three minutes each. This means that given 17 such breaks over nine innings, television commercials alone account for 51 minutes; add in another 18 minutes for the commercials aired during six pitching changes, and you have 1 hour and 9 minutes of a ballgame given over to commercials. A sports Marxist might be inclined here to argue, on the model of socialized medicine, for socialized (or commercial-free) baseball, though none has thus far come forth to do so.
The slowness of baseball doesn’t seem such a problem if one goes to the park to watch a game. The punishment of the commercials, with their dreary repetition, makes it so. (Speaking of punishment, on my recent trips to Wrigley Field to watch the Cubs, I note that management, on the mistaken assumption that it is enhancing the entertainment value of the outing, has decided to play thunderous rock music between innings, making conversation about the game and about anything else impossible.)
But the solution of the between-inning and pitching-change commercial breaks that lengthen the time of baseball games is really quite simple. Give me a drum roll here: It’s called reading. Keep a magazine or lightish book on your lap during these breaks, as I invariably do, and revert to it during them. You can usually get in a page of reading during commercial breaks, and sometimes even get in a brief paragraph between foul balls during a lengthy, or what these days is called a quality, at bat.
Baseball, like 19th-century novels, has always contained its longueurs, or dullish, if sometimes necessary, stretches: the foul balls, the trips by managers and pitching coaches to the mound, and now the camera reviews of challenged umpire calls. It’s part of the deal and for most of us not too much to have to put up with in exchange for witnessing a game of great difficulty—as has often been remarked, if a batter gets a hit one of three times at bat, he’s thought immensely successful—and impressive subtlety played with astonishing skill. If the game is too slow for you, best perhaps to walk away and to turn instead to wrestling or mixed martial arts or perhaps choose a becalming participatory sport: checkers or tiddlywinks. You won’t, I’m fairly sure, be missed.
Joseph Epstein, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author, most recently, of Wind Sprints: Essays.
