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Baseball should not be afraid of the dark By Jim Caple Page 2 |
| I'm old enough to remember the sun-dappled good old days when baseball played the World Series during golden October afternoons and children everywhere gathered on school playgrounds to listen to the game on transistor radios during recess.
Which isn't as easy as it seems. Had any of these complaining writers been paying attention to geography in school -- instead of spending their days listening to ballgames -- they would know that the continental United States has four time zones. That makes beginning a game at a convenient time for everyone downright impossible. Start a game any earlier than 8 p.m. or so in the east and you're beginning it in the middle of the West Coast rush hour. Wait until everyone gets home on the West Coast and you would have to go head-to-head against Letterman's Top Ten list. The problem is not when the games begin, anyway. It's when they end. And in recent years (coinciding oddly enough with the latest Yankees dynasty), they often last longer than the Academy Awards, averaging closer and closer to four hours. We all know why the games last so long -- three-minute commercial breaks, batters performing Bob Fosse routines while adjusting their cups and wristbands between pitches, multiple pitching changes per inning -- but, like organ music, no one does a damn thing about it. If you want to get World Series games over before midnight, the only sensible approach is to shorten the games. Require batters to stay in the box between pitches. Set and enforce a time limit between pitches. Shorten commercial breaks. At all opportunities, encourage faster play. Yeah, I know World Series games are important, but they were equally important in 1985, too, and they somehow played those seven games in less than three hours each. Games last so much longer now only because we allow them to. And they will get even longer unless we start cracking down. If you want more kids to see the end of World Series games, speed them up. These are baseball games, for crying out loud, not PBS pledge drives. During "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," we may sing "I don't care if I never get back," but that's just a figure of speech. Jim Caple is a senior writer for ESPN.com. |
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