Baseball is the game without a clock.
Instead, there are 18 half innings, nine a side, to be played out in however long the day’s action dictates. There is no taking a knee to run out the final seconds or continually fouling the opponent to delay the inevitable.
In baseball, all of the outs must be recorded for the ballgame to be complete.
There was a time when this dance was a sub-two hour affair. In fact, the game’s initial appeal to fans in the late 1800s and early 1900s was largely because of the game’s rapid pace. The sport’s design was not up and down, back and forth, like basketball or hockey; but there was still a quickness, a flow in the overall activity that kept fans on the edge of their seats and back scooting out the turnstiles in under 120 minutes.
Well, things have changed immeasurably since. Now the games almost always surpass the three hour mark, and busting four isn’t uncommon. Batters step out of the box and look for signs with nobody on and nobody out. Catchers come out to meet pitchers several times a game, as if it’s a lazy Sunday morning and there’s an egg-white frittata to be passed. The manager gets happy feet in the late innings, thinking it necessary to replace his hurler for each new hitter that steps to the plate.
Which brings us to yesterday’s news.
Baseball has voted to expand its use of instant replay. Whereas before the only reviews were for home runs, now they have essentially opened it up for everything else. Did that slicing line drive catch some chalk when it landed down the left field line? Let’s go take a look. Was that out call correct on that bang-bang play at first? It was close...might as well go look at it from 45 different angles. Is this necessary? I vote no.
A Long Campaign
Let’s remember that not only are the games long, the season itself is a marathon. A mind-boggling 162 games are played, followed by three full rounds of playoffs. The players begin reporting to camp in February and the World Series champs don’t punch out until Halloween.
There is ample opportunity within that time frame time for a team to prove its worth. Maybe you are the beneficiary of a missed call one day. The next time you might be on the other end. At the end of the day, they are minor blips on the giant radar that is the baseball regular season.
But somehow, we have become a sports nation obsessed with everything being correct. We need it one-hundred percent right one-hundred percent of the time. Anything less is not good enough. Terms like “human error” are considered sacrilege, no longer a welcome part of our national pastime.
Managers will be given an allotment of two “challenges” a game, with all reviews coming directly from the umpires after the sixth inning. Because if there is anything baseball needs more of, it is extended stretches without any game action taking place.
Those in support of the system will tell you these reviews will be completed in under a minute. I’ve heard that testimony before, and it’s never held up in court. Football said the same things when they instituted their system, but watch a game this weekend, and see how long these things take. You could melt a frozen turkey in the time it takes for Ed Hochuli to deem whether that second foot came down in bounds.
Baseball needs to be doing all that it can to make games shorter and faster. This sends the rock rolling even faster down the hill instead of doing whatever we can to push it back the other way. Even if this change adds all of four or five minutes to a game, it’s too much.
Maybe you’re someone who enjoys the climactic moments of the World Series taking place well after Letterman has delivered his opening monologue; I’m not. Midnight and beyond is for PB & J, a few Ruffles on the side, and an old sitcom re-run helping send you off to sleep. It’s not for our most precious of baseball moments.
An Untimed Lunch
Today I will be having lunch with a friend who just celebrated his 92nd birthday. We share a love for this game and its history. He will tell me a story, like the time he hitched a ride to a game with Babe Dahlgren, the man that followed Lou Gehrig at first base for the Yankees. He will tell tales about the Gashouse Gang, reliving the heroics of Dizzy Dean and Ducky Medwick, baseball legends with names that could have passed for cartoon characters.
I can ask him if he ever remembers a game, or a season, turning on a single blundered call. He will tell me, no, he cannot recall such an instance. The players played and the umpires umpired. Each made their own mistakes along the way, and they were accepted as part of the game’s natural charm. More importantly, they were accepted because they had no other choice -- the game had to keep moving.
Now we have decided it is okay to bring said proceedings to a halt. Let’s turn nine innings into nine hours. Heaven forbid a call on the field would ever be anything less than 100% accurate; the earth might stop spinning.
I happened to like it when baseball was dotted with a little bit of imperfection. It mirrored real life.
Maybe some of the stories I’ll hear at lunch today will have minor mistakes, little factual errors that come with the retelling of any event that took place decades in the past.
But I won’t cut him off and I won’t pull out my iPhone to double-check each individual statement. The conversation would get bogged down and the rhythm of the afternoon would be lost. Nobody will be timing how long we sit in that booth, but I can assure you it won’t exceed three hours.
That’s not how the game was meant to be played.
