While watching the dreadful Pittsburgh Pirates recently, I was struck by something very confusing. It was extra innings, and each team somehow started the inning with a runner on second base. The runner magically materialized on my TV after the commercial break. I tried to figure out when that player had batted, presumably with a lead-off double. I thought maybe the TV broadcast blew the coverage.
But then the same thing happened the next inning. What was going on?
I soon learned that Major League Baseball, in its latest slavish innovation to “speed up the pace of the game,” apparently at all costs, has created this new gimmick. I guess MLB and its fans don’t like games that go into too many extra innings. They’ve thus concocted a plot to insert an artificial runner at the start of every extra inning. This ensures a greater likelihood of ending the game earlier.
This also means goodbye to epic extra-inning games. I thought those games were fascinating, like a chess match, as each team exhausted its roster. But apparently, MLB’s hope is that such endurance tests never happen again.
Of course, MLB recently implemented a clock for the pitcher, akin to the NBA’s shot clock. That, too, was a major change, a bow at the altar of the all-important objective of “speeding up the pace of the game.”
But why?
Sure, baseball mavens will invoke data and theories explaining why America’s national pastime is no longer that, having ceded that title to the NFL. Their baseball “fans” are bored by long games. But that’s usually non-fans. The most devoted fans — often derided as “purists” — don’t care whether their beloved sport averages two hours per game or 2½ hours. Call us purists, but we don’t care. We like long games, and we like watching them at the ballpark.
What’s great about baseball is that it never had a clock. Football and basketball and hockey have halves or quarters or periods, but with baseball, you play until one team outscores the other. As for fans bored by that, well, go watch the NFL and its vomitous, interminable litany of commercial breaks.
This impatience of fans for the flow of America’s national pastime — a game that goes back to the 19th century — is the fault not of the sport but of modern Americans. They want everything now. They can’t wait. They detest inaction. Look at a group of people waiting for something. They’re on their phones. They can’t just sit, think or start a conversation with a stranger.
The Italians have a saying: dolce far niente. It means the sweetness of doing nothing. Put down your phone. Go for a walk, sit at a park bench, go to a creek. Watch, observe, talk to someone. Slow down. There can be a sweetness in doing nothing.
Connecting to this baseball illustrates the point even more. You can go to a game in a nice setting — someone once observed that it’s fitting that baseball is played in a “park” or “field” rather than an “arena” or “stadium” — and take in the sounds, sights, feel. You can truly pass the time with baseball, almost every day from April to October.
But you can’t so sweetly pass the time when the game is artificially changed, sped up for people who don’t appreciate the slower pace, whether at the ballpark or in their own hurried, impatient, busy lives.
The problem isn’t baseball; it’s us.