Baseball’s pace doesn’t need fixing

GLENDALE, Ariz. — So you wanted to see a major league baseball game this year. Better get off the couch and get on the websites.

Now that the four-pitch intentional walk is gone, the stampede to buy MLB tickets will be just like the Gold Rush.

Surely you’re tired of hearing your neighbors say, “You know, if they would just do away with that four-pitch intentional walk, I’d be there every night. Because I love the freeways at 6:30, and $10 beers and getting my ears blown off by bad music.”

The Guys In Charge have decided that baseball games are too slow and, this time, they’re really going to do something.

By shaving the 45 seconds or so that it takes to put a guy on first, they’re starting a revolution that will wean everyone off the videogames and cellphones.

The NFL must be terrified. Just for confirmation, let’s hear from actual players.

Scott Van Slyke: “If you don’t like watching baseball games, don’t watch them. I think there’s a problem with people who think it’s a problem.”

Kenley Jansen: “Games aren’t too long. This is getting out of control. There’s over 3 million people coming to watch the Dodgers every year.”

Why MLB is laboring to find an unnecessary solution to an imaginary crisis is not clear.

Maybe it’s the advertisers. Maybe it’s the constant urge to cater to the “millennials,” many of whom are rising at 5:30 a.m. to go to work and can’t be expected to watch playoff games that drone past midnight.

“If they’re worried about the attention spans, that’s not going to get better, it’s going to get worse,” Van Slyke said. “How many people are we actually losing? People leave games for tons of reasons.”

Attendance in 2016 was down by 6.3 million since the record year of 2007, according to BaseballReference.com. That is not insignificant.

But it was still the 11th-highest volume in baseball history and the 13th-best average crowd (30,131).

The slowest year on record is 2014, when games dragged on to a 3:07 average. That was also MLB’s seventh-best attendance year.

Thirty years ago the average crowd was 24,708. Games in that 1987 season were 20 minutes faster than in 2014.

People don’t go to baseball games for two hours and leave. It’s not youth soccer. The ballpark is, or should be, a destination.

“The people in charge are making it an issue,” Van Slyke said. “If you start speeding it up, what are you going to do about the 60-to-80 group that’s going to miss the nostalgia of sitting there for three hours and drinking beer and talking about it?”

The obvious cure is to call strikes. Call them like the rulebook says. Don’t shrink the bottom of the zone. Raise the top line and leave the bottom line where it’s supposed to be.

If you do that, walks will go down but so will strikeouts, because batters won’t be taking until they fall behind 0-2.

Dead time will recede. (Speaking of that, Grateful Dead fans don’t gripe about five-hour concerts).

The games we all remember — Game 7 of last year’s World Series, Game 6 of the 1986 Series, the 14-inning DodgersGiants game in September 2015, the four-homers-in-a-row game between L.A. and San Diego in 2006 — all lasted beyond the desired expiration date.

They required major investment from player and fan. There has to be room somewhere on earth for something like that.