Get along, now

Baseball's initiatives to speed up the game paying off

When it comes to baseball, my boy, Luke, has the attention span of a rather inattentive rock. A gangly, 5 ½-year-old rock.

Getting him interested in the game of baseball, getting him to care, getting him to really appreciate all its subtleties is hard. Nothing about it is easy.

I take him out to the field and he immediately starts drawing in the dirt with his fat purple bat. I get his toes pointing toward the plate and encourage him to dig in a little, and he starts playing Bash the Ants.

I push his hands together, show him how to bend his knees, I toss a few tennis balls across the plate, I get all worked up when he actually hits one with that purple club of his and then he says, "Great, Dad. Can we go play at Wacky World?"

This is what Major League Baseball has to deal with. These are the game's future fans.

Let's face it. Baseball is not the game for kids that it used to be. Sure, if their dads or moms spend enough time with them at the park, or enough time with them on the couch watching baseball, they can fall in love with it. Or, at least, learn to like it some.

But there's a whole world of other games out there for kids now. Games to play. Games to watch. Games to play and watch. Computer games are big nowadays, I hear.

The thing is, with all the choices out there, you have to grab young attention spans and hold on like mad. You gotta be flashy to get fans, and then you have to make the game interesting enough to keep them coming back.

Baseball is not flashy. Baseball, to a lot of kids, is just plain boring.

To make it less boring, and maybe a tad more flashy, Major League Baseball is trying to speed its game up. Not necessarily make the game shorter, mind you, though that couldn't hurt. You get stuck in a ballpark in the seventh inning, with three hours of your life already gone and a traffic jam waiting, you start wandering whether it's all worth it. And nobody watches a whole three-hour-plus game on TV anymore. Nobody under 65, anyway.

But the length of the game is not problem No. 1. No, baseball is more concerned about what it calls the "pace of game." Baseball officials want to make things a little snappier. They want to cut out all the dead space. They want to keep the game moving along so people -- young people, especially -- don't get all fidgety and start reaching for their GameBoys.

It's working, too. The speeding up part, anyway. Game times are down. Recent numbers show the average time for a major league game this year is down to 2 hours and 46 minutes. Last year, it was 2:52.

Now, six minutes may not seem like a lot. It's like the average time between ball one and ball two for Steve Trachsel. It takes Jack McKeon that long to make it up the steps for a pitching change.

But, again, we're talking the pace of games. And that's improved, too. Umps are trying to get pitchers to deliver a pitch every 12 seconds. The old rule was every 20 seconds. Managers, when making pitching changes, are asked to signal the bullpen when they come out of the dugout, instead of waiting until they reach the mound. Relievers are supposed to be in from the bullpen and throwing the first pitch within two minutes of getting the call.

And, of course, umps are encouraging batters to quit adjusting everything from cap to cup after every pitch. A couple of years ago, an ump called Detroit's Bobby Higginson for too much between-pitch twitching. The pitcher was ordered to throw after Higginson balked about getting back into the box.

Baseball is serious about this. Back in 2000, the average baseball game took a full three hours to pull off. Now, umps have stopwatches to speed things up and a fan is almost as likely to see a 2-½ hour game as he or she is to see a three-hour one. Recent stats show there have been 142 games under 2 ½ hours this season, and 155 above 3:00.

Baseball has a long way to go to attract more young fans, and a long way to go to keep them. But pushing things along is a good start.

And, I'm telling you, it sure as heck beats Bash the Ants.

John Donovan is a senior writer for SI.com.

Comments? To e-mail Donovan, click here.

 

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