Do postseason games take too long?

Old joke: Guy goes to the doctor. Doc tells him he has a short time to live. “No problem,” guy says. “I’ll go to a baseball game. They last forever.”

Oh, baseball, we kid because we love. This postseason your average nine-inning game is lasting 3 hours and 31 minutes, which is a good deal short of forever but six minutes longer than last postseason and 17 minutes longer than the one before. And all this comes after a regular season in which the average nine-inning game lasted three hours and five minutes, longest in baseball history.

The World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Houston Astros begins tonight. First pitch is set for 8:09 pm ET. And last pitch? Well, that’ll probably come sometime past 11:30 p.m. in the Eastern time zone. Which begs the question: How long is too long?

Bob Costas thinks such queries are less pressing in the crucible of the playoffs, when the games are close and the stakes are high.

“And with so much at stake, the strategic moves are all the more interesting,” Costas tells USA TODAY Sports. “But in the regular season, pace of play is a real concern. A pitch clock, at least with no one on base, is a real possibility.”

Baseball has long prided itself as the great American team sport not governed by the tyranny of time. Roy Hobbs of the New York Knights made time stand still in Bernard Malamud’s mythic novel “The Natural” when he launched a first-pitch home run into a clock on the right-field wall at Ebbets Field against the Brooklyn Dodgers. “The clock spattered minutes all over the place,” Malamud wrote.

USA TODAY Sports talked to fans who watch games at ballparks and fans who watch on TV to gauge their feelings about the pace of play that one fan — Thomas Palmen of Chicago — calls “glacially slow.” We heard complaints about pitchers taking too long to pitch, batters adjusting their batting gloves, multiple visits to the mound by catchers — minutes spattered all over the place.

“In this day and age, slow is boring, and boring is death,” offers Burt Solomon of Arlington, Va.

We also heard how a pitch clock could tamper with the timelessness of our national pastime. Why change timehonored rules to suit fans with shrinking attention spans at the expense of fans who embrace the game’s quieter moments? Traditionalists figure pregnant pauses in the playoffs only serve to heighten the drama.

“I don’t know if you truly can speed up baseball,” says Tasha Ellis of Washington, D.C. “Players have rituals.”

Steve Scalise, R-La., majority whip of the House of Representatives, thinks the quality of postseason games trumps the quantity of minutes it takes to play them. Scalise’s love of baseball is legendary: He nearly died in June when a gunman fired on Republican members of Congress practicing for a charity game.

“I think fans expect playoff games to take a little longer because of the increased pressure involved in every at bat,” he tells USA TODAY Sports. “They know you’re probably going to see more calls to the bullpen than a regular season game, more mound visits, challenges — that sort of thing. But the quality of playoff baseball is so high that you just don’t want to turn it off.”

Some fans stop short of turning off their TVs but don’t exactly hang on every pitch either.

“I usually have the game in the background while I send out emails or use my computer,” says John Kim, a fan in Austin, Texas. “I start paying more attention when the crowd starts making a lot of noise, or when it gets closer to the end of the game.”

Do pace-of-play questions even matter when the Dodgers and Astros are the first 100-win teams to meet in the World Series since 1970? This looks like a Series to savor.

Kim points out no one remembers how long a game takes when it ends with a walk-off home run. Joe Carter’s in Game 6 of the 1993 World Series won the Series for the Toronto Blue Jays over the Philadelphia Phillies — and no one in Canada cared that the game lasted 3 hours and 27 minutes.

Still, World Series games averaged under three hours in 1988, the last time the Dodgers played in the Series. This Series could well have shorter games than the rest of this postseason because time of game has a way of decreasing as the playoffs go on. That’s because the wild card and best-of-five format, with its more frequent off days, allow for more aggressive use of bullpens. Saturday’s Game 7 in the ALCS clocked in at 3:09, quickest Game 7 since 2004.

And no less an eminence than MLB commissioner Rob Manfred is concerned about pace of play. “We continue to struggle with time of the game, mound visits, pitchers that don’t deliver the ball properly,” he told reporters in June.

Paul Olivier Jr. of Atlanta adds his pet peeve: “Few things drive me crazy like a batter taking time to step out of the box, take a practice cut, adjust the Velcro on his batting glove, and then step back in.”

George Will offered a whimsical proposal in a June column: Ban batting gloves. “No one, from Ty Cobb through Ted Williams, used them, and now they occasion time-consuming fidgets,” Will wrote.

Baseball has made some small moves to hasten pace, including the “automatic” walk — eliminating the need to throw four balls for an intentional pass — and a time limit on managers’ deliberations for replay reviews. But the 20-second pitch clock, already in use in much of the minor leagues, may well make its way to the big leagues, perhaps as soon as next season. Manfred has hinted at unilateral action if the players association doesn’t agree to moves to keep games moving.

“Looking toward 2018, the amount of time taken between pitches is definitely something MLB should look at, and that makes sense,” says Scalise, who threw out the ceremonial first pitch for a Nationals playoff game. “But I think what fans are most interested in is action and a high quality of play — and right now you have no shortage of that on the baseball diamond.”

“Hit ‘em where they ain’t” — Wee Willie Keeler’s maxim cited in the title of Solomon’s book — is so 1890s. Nowadays, hitters try to hit over defenders rather than past them. MLB set a record for home runs in a season in 2017 — and also set a record for strikeouts in a season. That nags at comedian Randy Sklar, who costars with his twin brother Jason on the podcast “A View from the Cheap Seats.”

“It has become less about fielders turning double plays and hits to the gap,” Sklar says. “It’s all about home runs and strikeouts now. That really puts the focus on three players: the pitcher, catcher and batter. That takes the rest of the fielders out of the mix.”