Let’s bottle World Series’ Game 1 for its quickness

It’s late October and the World Series started Tuesday night. Time to hunker down. This was going to take a while.

According to baseball-reference.com, no post-season baseball game had taken less than 21/2 hours to complete since 2011.

In this post-season, games averaged more than 31/2 hours. In last year’s competitive, compelling World Series between the Cubs and the Indians, the seven games averaged three hours, 42 minutes.

So it’s not unusual, at 10:30 p.m. EST, to be settling in for another hour or more of baseball.

And yet, Tuesday night, Kenley Jansen induced a first-pitch out from Houston’s Jose Altuve to secure a 3-1 Los Angeles victory in a neat, tidy and extremely pleasing-to-consume two hours, 28 minutes. Yep, that’s right. Savour it. That’s the shortest World Series game in a generation, the shortest since 1992, when Tom Glavine threw a complete game for Atlanta but lost to the Toronto Blue Jays, 2-1, in Game 4.

And Major League Baseball might want to take two hours and 28 minutes to try to replicate it.

Commissioner Rob Manfred should be granted wide latitude in making sure the pace of play increases.

If Manfred needs pitch clocks, use pitch clocks. If he needs to limit visits by the pitching coach to the mound, then limit visits. If he needs umpires to enforce a rule that hitters must keep one foot in the batter’s box in between pitches (as long as they haven’t fouled one off), then empower the umps. This is what baseball can and should be. Clean. Crisp. Fun.

It likely will not be repeated. But revel in how this one played out. Imagine a world in which a kid could see a World Series game and not fall asleep in her or his cereal bowl the next morning.