Baseball games almost unbearable
Late starts, later finishes and huge delays are making the game almost unbearable
The last time the Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers met in the World Series, the Dodgers were actually the Brooklyn Robins.
It was 1916. Casey Stengel played for the Robins. Babe Ruth pitched for the Red Sox. Ruth won Game 2 — allowing six hits and one run in 14 innings to get the win. The game took two hours and 32 minutes to play.
The Red Sox won that series, four games to one. The final game took one hour and 43 minutes to play. The Sox would win again in 1918. The Red Sox would not win another World Series until 2004, or about as long as it takes to get through the average baseball playoff game today.
I jest. But only a little. Consider the 13-inning monster the Dodgers and Milwaukee Brewers played last week. That one took a mere five hours and 15 minutes — longer than any two games in 1916.
Last week, I had the most enjoyable baseball experience in years. Looking to time the intervals between pitches after being driven to the brink of insanity watching the Dodgers, Brewers, Red Sox and Astros find reasons not to play ball, I decided to go back and listen to a couple of oldtime radio broadcasts.
I chose the 1957 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Milwaukee Braves because it’s the series that got me into baseball in the first place, after I lingered at the sporting goods store in my hometown listening to the radio broadcast.
Was the game really that different back then? Or was nostalgia telling lies? I listened in its entirety to a radio broadcast of Game 4 from Milwaukee’s County Stadium on Oct. 6, 1957. (And as the box score will tell you — day game, grass field.)
It was different. And it was lovely. There was no “bullpenning.” No launch angles or exit velocity. No batting gloves being adjusted. No pitchers making like they’re posing for statues.
The game moved along, much as I remembered. Using my stopwatch, I had timed modern pitchers taking between 30 and 45 seconds to release the ball. But here was veteran lefty Warren Spahn delivering pitches to the Yankees at roughly 15-second intervals.
I had to time the top of the third inning four times on my stopwatch before I was certain the timing was correct: In that half-inning, Spahn went through a murderers’ row of Yankees (Tony Kubek, Hank Bauer and Mickey Mantle) in a grand total of one minute and 10 seconds. Spahn threw five pitches: two to get Kubek, one for Bauer, two for Mantle. All ground balls, three batters retired in less time than it takes some hitters today to adjust their batting gloves.
Bullpenning ? The 36-yearold Spahn worked 10 innings that day, giving up a first-inning run to the Yankees, but holding them scoreless for the next seven innings before surrendering three runs as the Bronx Bombers tied it in the ninth. But Spahn wasn’t pulled even then: he worked the 10th, giving up another run, and got the win after Milwaukee scored three runs in the bottom of the inning.
The time for a 10-inning, 7-5 game? Two hours and 31 minutes. Slow compared with Game 5, when Lew Burdette outduelled Whitey Ford in two hours flat, 1-0.
The Braves, of course, went on to win the series in seven games, with Burdette winning three games and becoming the first pitcher since Christy Mathewson to pitch two shutouts in one World Series. I became a Braves fan and a baseball fan — a passion that is being sorely tested today.
Today’s playoff baseball games are becoming almost unbearable. They start late and finish later. Chilly fans, wrapped up like polar explorers, sit there after midnight, looking stunned, cheering mostly for the games to end. It’s the modern way.
Bullpenning (the practice of yanking pitchers, in some cases, after a single hitter) has robbed the sport of the essential drama of starting pitcher against hitter and helped to extend the games far into the night.
Replays, as in every sport, accomplish little except to waste time and spark controversies. (See the Mookie Betts fan interference call from the ALCS if you think replays in baseball accomplish anything.)
Now the sabremetricians have discovered pitchers actually add slightly to their velocity by taking extra seconds between pitches, so we will probably never see an end to the bloat that has turned too many baseball games into an exercise in tedium. Over the course of a season, they claim, the added velocity can lead to a reduction of 10 runs by a pitching staff — enough to justify boring us all to tears.
I’ll watch bits of the World Series when it begins Tuesday night. But when it grows tedious (usually somewhere around the fifth inning, if not before), I’ll crawl into bed, put on the headphones and choose an old World Series game at random.
After all, any game from 1949, or 1955 or 1964 is likely to finish before I fall asleep. That’s a good deal more than I can say for today’s game.