Four more years? Enough is enough
Four more years of the present trend will result in one of the worst crack-ups in American history. The pace we are on is simply unsustainable. Soon we’ll be the laughingstocks of the world. Maybe we already are. We used to snicker, hearing about five-hour-long cricket matches. Cricket!
The great American game – baseball – is on the verge of ruin. It’s not steroids this time. Or gambling. It’s the length of games. Three-and-a-half and four-hour-plus games are tedious, time-consuming, and for the most part unwatchable.
Sorry, Commissioner Manfred – Rob Manfred – baseball is going down the tubes. You must do more to stem the tide of nothingness.
As one of the redoubtable voices of baseball, Bob Costas, recently put it, “It’s maddening – just maddening – when teams use a dozen pitchers combined in a 4-2 game. It’s not good for the game as an entertainment product.”
Joe DiMaggio must be rolling over in his grave. (Watch out, Marilyn.) The Yankee Clipper was an entertainer as much as he was a ballplayer. Asked why he always played hard, DiMaggio centered his answer on the entertainment side of his work. He didn’t want to disappoint the guys and gals in the stands seeing him play for the first time, he said.
Others assumed he was in the entertainment business.
DiMaggio set one of the great records in baseball by getting at least one base hit in 56 consecutive games. During the streak, a song, popularized by one of the big bands of the era, played day and night on the radio.
It went like this: “… From coast to coast, that’s all your hear/Of Joe the One-Man Show/He’s glorified the horsehide sphere….”
Do you know who else was a one-man show? The Pirates’ Roberto Clemente was a one-man show.
The basket catches. The throws from deep outfield to nab surprised runners busting their butts to get to the next base. The blinding speed, the flair for the dramatic.
These were entertaining – as they say, worth the price of admission.
Entertainers don’t let audience members sit in the bleacher seats (or on their couches at home) twiddling their thumbs.
The year the great DiMaggio (thanks, Hemingway) went 56 for 56 the average time it took to play a nine-inning major league baseball game was two hours and nine minutes – 2:09. The year was 1941, the same year Ted Williams hit .406.
(The most entertaining – because it’s the most astounding – statistic in all of sports was set by Williams. Williams hit .388 for the full 1957 season. In the second half of that year – after the all-star game break – Williams hit .453 – a number so otherworldly that it’s hard to comprehend.)
In 1951, the year Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays both broke into the big leagues, the average time for an MLB nine inning game was 2:19, according to baseballreference.com.
Sixty years ago, the year the Pirates beat the Yankees in the World Series, games on average took 2:33 to play. Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, climaxed by the Bill Mazeroski heroics, was played in 2:36. The final score was 10-9.
Costas pointed out last week that a game played in the shortened 2020 season between the Yankees and Indians also ended in a 10-9 score. That nine inning affair was played in 4:55.
“This is not the way to go,” Costas told sports talk host Christopher Russo (Mad Dog to the rest of you). Costas called the pace of play in the big leagues “lethargic.”
“Glacial” jumps to mind.
Here’s a fact to ponder, sports fans. Nearly the same number of runs were scored per nine innings in 1920 – 8.72 – as in 2020 – 9.29 – yet the average length of a game played in 1920 was nearly an hour shorter than one played in 2020.
Like the devolution from George Washington to Donald Trump, we seem to be going backwards here.
During night games at old Forbes Field, Pirates management would trim the causeway lights at the beginning of each half inning. In this way, the light standard lights served as stage lighting. Illumination, please!
Manager-umpire arguments were entertaining. A manager getting tossed was part of the show. Nowadays, we fans endure the tedious spectacle of umpires on headsets awaiting the call from New York on the video replay at second and whether the sliding runner lifted his foot off the bag long enough to be tagged out by the anal shortstop.
I attended several Fayette County League games this past summer. No long at bats. Batters did not seem intent on driving up the pitch count. No launch angles. Batters didn’t seem to care whether they hit one out of the park each time at the plate. More often than not balls were put in play. There was a dust-up or two. A manager got the old heave-ho.
Now that’s baseball.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. His latest book, “JFK Rising,” is available on Amazon. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.