Baseball Still Needs to be Saved

There are at least two things I have in common with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor: Both of us grew up in poor New York City neighborhoods, she in the South Bronx, me in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, and both of us pledge allegiance to the American League Champion New York Yankees.

On the day, President Obama nominated Judge Sotomayor to become the first Latina (and third woman) to sit on America's highest court, he pointed out that many credit her with "saving baseball" because of her ruling in favor of the players’ union that effectively ended the 1995 strike.

Well, after watching the Yankees eliminate the Angels in the sixth game of the Yankees-Angels series two nights ago, it became abundantly clear that Major League Baseball still needs saving.

The pace of today's brand of baseball is tortoise-slow, with catchers visiting the mound to talk with hurlers after every other pitch, with managers or pitching coaches walking to the mound every inning, with batters stepping out of the box after every pitch to adjust their batting gloves or cross themselves or do whatever players a generation ago saw no need to do.

For these reasons, a sub-three hour game nowadays is a rarity. Yet there is no more than 15 minutes of real action in a Major League Baseball game.

Fifteen minutes. That's it.

It saddens me that so many kids today shun baseball. The only thing worse than playing baseball, the kids say, is watching baseball.

"Too slow," they say. "Too boring."

Baseball wasn’t too slow or too boring to my dad who used to put on his Sunday best to watch Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella and Willie Mays and Hank Aaron and the other former Negro League stars augment their greatness in the major leagues.

Nor was baseball slow or boring to me when I sat in Yankee Stadium or Shea Stadium (the Mets’ former home) or in front of my TV.

But for much of today’s youth, baseball is "dull" and "tired."

Well, Major League Baseball has done this to itself. The length of a game over the past twenty years has expanded in direct proportion to the typical American’s waistline.

Baseball today has an obesity problem.

In the 1984 season the average major league game lasted 2 hours, 35 minutes. Two decades later the average game time was 2 hours, 53 minutes. Now, the average postseason game tops the three-hour mark.

That would be absolutely great if baseball today gave us 25 additional minutes of action per game. Instead, we get 25 extra minutes of inertia.

Why baseball officials, from Omissioner Bud Selig on down, have not solved this problem is beyond me.

Apparently, all Selig & Company care about are TV ratings. Yankees vs. Phillies should be a highly rated World Series. But that doesn't mean the games wouldn't be better, more exciting, more watchable were they played at a faster pace.

Umpires should enforce the rule that a pitcher has 20 seconds to deliver a pitch. Not 60 seconds. Twenty seconds.

And why don’t the umpires make the batter stay in the box until his at-bat is over? Just because a batter asks for time, or just assumes he can have time out by leaving the box, does not mean an umpire should grant the time out.

Invariably, during a crucial at-bat late in a game, either the pitcher will step off the rubber to stop the "action" or a batter will call time and step out of the box before every pitch!

One at-bat now can take as long as an entire half-inning used to take.

The seventh inning alone in Game 5 of the Yankees-Angels series took 45 minutes!

The irony is kids learn to play baseball by watching adults, but the adults in the majors today could learn much by watching how crisply the kids play.

The problem of baseball boredom is somewhat tolerable if you’re at home, remote control in hand, and can switch from one game to another after every pitch.

During the 2009 regular season, I did that more often than ever on days when the Yankees and Mets played simultaneously--not because I care about the Mets (I don’t), but because I’ve become exasperated by the snail-like pace of the Yankees game.

Perhaps, Justice Sotomayor can come to the rescue again...after our Yankees polish off the Phillies and become World Series champs for a record 27th time.

Perhaps she convince enough of her fellow justices to rule in favor of speeding up what used to be our national pastime before it dies of terminal ennui.

Because despite the wise Latina's ruling in 1995, the game she and I both love still needs to be saved.