…a few more games like the Wild Card play-ins this week and baseball will be competing with jai alai (or “Polish handball,” as they called it on Mad Men), for relevance and popularity.
Last night’s snoozefest between the Dodgers and Cardinals—soon, no doubt, to be relabeled “a classic”—was a nine-inning game with 4 runs and 12 hits that took an insane 4 hours and 15 minutes to play.
There were also a total of 8 walks and 17 strikeouts served up by the game’s 11 pitchers, all of whom seemed to run every count to 3-2 before surrendering 4-5 foul balls.
For those who have yearned to watch batting practice pitched by Sandy Koufax, it was an epic.
The ALCS was little better. Three hours and 13 minutes, for 8 runs, 13 hits, 7 walks (none by the Yankees; more on that later), and a whopping 20 strikeouts.
This was “Three True Outcomes” baseball at its purest—and pure boredom at its most extended.
As the song goes, somethin’s gotta give. At this rate, I fear it will be any remaining interest in our beautiful game.
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5 comments:
You make a good point. I tried to watch that game several times including in the 9th and turned it off with the score still tied. It was taking too long.
You can't blame this on mathematics geeks from MIT. The average major league fastball is now close to 95; a quarter century ago each team had maybe one guy who could reach that velocity. This is more a problem of PEDs--human growth hormone, notoriously hard to detect, is still running rampant through this sport, along with other drugs. Until someone develops an effective way to really get the drugs out of athletics in general and baseball in particular this kind of thing will persist indefinitely.
As a supposed or so-called sporting spectacle Jai alai is in reality a ludicrous unwatchable laughable embarrassing joke.
One obvious solution is to move the fences back, a lot further back. You'll see much more athleticism, smaller players, guys who make contact. MLB could mandate distances.
Another solution: lower the pitcher's mound by half. Or stop calling the high strike.
The Hammer of God
The above trashing of Jai Alai was unwarranted. Granted, it isn`t a sport thats destined to engulf the world (like soccer for instance) but it is at least reasonably entertaining and watchable.
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