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National Passed Time Baseball is still our game -- if we can stay awake
Updated: Wednesday October 25, 2000 12:16 PM
The most boring sports critics in the world are those who protest that baseball is too boring because nothing ever happens. They are even more boring than I am when I am at my most boring, complaining that soccer is boring because nobody ever scores. One man's meat is another man's poison. In fact, the real beauty of baseball is that, if you know the game, it is like the placid duck paddling furiously under water -- all sorts of things are happening or may be happening or could possibly happen soon, you think. Then, when something does happen it is that much more delicious. That, as much as the periodic action, is what makes baseball such a marvelous sport. But the beauty of baseball is somewhat elusive to discern if you are sound asleep. OK, this is spoken as succinctly as a man can say it: Baseball games take too long nowadays. And when they are laden with too many commercials, as these playoffs and World Series games have been, then they send people to bed before they are over. Baseball isn't the National Pastime any more. It is the National Passed Time. In modern sport the games are all televised, and those games take longer, as players primp and pose for the cameras -- especially baseball batters, with all their new Velcro accoutrements. And, with more money on the line, athletes have decided that delay translates into improved performance. More is more. The Murphy's Law of modern sport is that everybody takes longer to do the same thing that people used to do faster -- especially the very simple things like a) getting ready to pitch and b) getting ready to bat. It is instructive that, besides baseball, tennis is the one sport that has most been most adversely affected by time waste. And tennis is the sport most like baseball, wherein one competitor serves up a pitch to another. Tennis matches have become so distended, in fact, as the server and the receiver mope around before serving and receiving, that the men's tour is experimenting with sets that are won at four games instead of six and with a final set that is not a set at all, but just a long tiebreaker. But, of course, all popular American sports except baseball have made serious efforts to move games along. A few weeks ago, a man named Danny Biasone went into the basketball Hall of Fame posthumously. Danny was a little guy who owned a bowling alley in Syracuse, N.Y. -- and absolutely saved professional basketball. It was he who invented the 24-second clock, which is now a basketball staple. Of course, if Biasone were alive now and trying to help baseball, nobody would give him the time of day -- in large part because the day would already be over. Baseball's hang-up is it is so proud of not being a game played by the clock that any mention of clock is taken as an insult to the very essence of the sport. It is true that a certain part of baseball's charm comes from the it-ain't-over-till-it's-over aspect; that, as the Red Sox of 1986 proved, no game is finished until the last man is out. OK, baseball, let's look at it this way: You don't have a clock problem. You have a calendar problem. The bizarre thing about baseball is nobody disputes that the games are too long, and because of this the game is being terribly harmed. Baseball simply needs a clock for the pitcher and the batter, so that game is played like this -- instead ... of ... being ... played ... like ... this. These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNNSI.com. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer
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