I haven't had the time lately to update the blog. I know the two of you out there are so upset. In any case, I do want to touch upon the recent comments by Major League Baseball Umpire Crew Chief Joe West.
For those of you that don't know, he essentially called the Red Sox and Yankees pathetic and embarrassing because of the amount of time they take while playing. See here, and here.
Listen, I understand that the league is trying to speed up games, but first the league needs to make it clear to the players exactly what the parameters are. If they want to institute a 30 second pitch clock or something, those parameters are clear. The problem is, when a pitcher takes forever a batter needs to be able to call time to step out of the box and allow things to proceed on more even terms, and if a batter is all over every pitch, a pitcher needs to have the option to slow things down.
The most interesting thing that Joe West said was this:
"They're two of the best teams in baseball. Why are they playing the slowest?"
How does that not answer his own question. These are two top tier teams, and they have top tier records. They take a good amount of time during a game. Is that not a direct corollary or what? Take your time, play your game of baseball, and you have a better chance of winning.
Beyond these issues, baseball is played during the innings, but if you've ever attended a live game, between innings there is a whole lot o sitting around, standing around, and waiting. COMMERCIALS. Baseball makes more money by taking more time. Every time a relief pitcher comes into a game, there is a commercial break. Also, because the Yankees and Red Sox are more of the premiere teams, about 50% of their games are nationally televised (when playing against one another) and that leads to longer commercials. Hank Aaron said essentially that "...ballplayers are paid to pitch and to hit, so they should stay in the box, not walk around...". The different between Hank's era and the post-steroid era of baseball is that this era is absurdly more profitable. When you have millions of viewers watching the Yankees and Red Sox play a ball game, I guarantee the syndicates are not upset about how much viewership they are receiving or how much they can sell add space for.
It seems Joe West's comments were made outside of the official umpire's union public relations department, because seriously, who thought this story would be released like this through the Bergen Record (it's from NJ). Joe West was probably just talking. In any event, this is bad for the umpire's. The players, managers, and owner's have a legitimate beef because based on the comments it appears as though there is a prejudice towards these teams because they are taking too long, and it could open a can of worms for other areas that these (supposed) unbiased judges are pre-judging.
I would think that if you had only a few fans watching games, the players might not care and want to speed the game up a bit. All in all, the MLB doesn't have a real problem with the length of a game, at least in my opinion. There is no game clock, so it's all relative, but for the NFL to complete 60 minutes of play, it takes an average of over 3 hours. 3 hours is the magical Michael Kay mark of "reasonable" to "unmanageable", as in, "...the time of play for tonight's game was a speed 2 hours and 53 minutes..." versus, "...the time of play tonight's game was a simply unmanageable 3 hours and 8 minutes...". Major League Baseball plays nine full innings, each inning has 6 outs, and a minimum of two commercial breaks or the half innings separating the play. When you compare the MLB to the NFL, I don't think it's very slow. The NFL has timeouts, TV timeouts, and sometimes you can have two NFL plays occur in about 2:30 of game time, each of those plays lasting for about 5 seconds.
I agree that the game should be sped up a bit - step out of the box less, less visits to the mound. But let's not completely damage what is great about this game. I agree, we don't need David Ortiz stepping out to adjust his gloves every pitch just to suck - it was one thing when he was awesome, but now, c'mon dude. Step in the box, and get your strikeout over with. For a sport to pride itself on "battling" and "lengthy at-bats", over 162 games, it is quite ridiculous for an umpire to make a statement of that kind without the whole of Major League Baseball behind him.
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