If time is on your side, sit down and enjoy postseason baseball
Take your pick:
• Postseason baseball has become an exercise in tedium.
• Postseason baseball is putting on full display the results of hard work and thought that has gone into the analytics revolution with its goal of using all possible resources and intelligence to win.
For me, both are true.
Given that, are today's postseason games entertaining or even watchable? It's all in the eye of the beholder.
The problem for baseball is that many younger eyes are wandering off to other things and that many older eyes can't stay open much past the fifth inning of night games.
Before we go any further, I'm not one of those "get off my lawn" older guys. Quite the contrary. I was one of the first baseball beat writers to fully accept, embrace and use analytics and sabermetrics in my daily work.
I've also come to terms with the length of regular-season and postseason games, and I've never had a problem with bat flips or players wearing their caps at angles other than straight-on forward.
But there are some conflicting feelings about how these postseason games have been played.
Managers are making pitching change after pitching change, pitchers are throwing more pitches (because batters are working counts more deeply than they ever have), and pitchers also are taking longer than ever between pitches to deliver the ball.
With so much at stake, everybody is taking the time to make sure they get the edge.
And it's much time that they're taking.
Game 1 of the National League championship series took four hours, two minutes to play. It was a nine-inning game that began at 7:09 p.m. The Milwaukee Brewers and the Los Angeles Dodgers combined to throw 164 pitches each. Game 4 of the NLCS, a 13-inning affair, took five hours, 15 minutes. That game also began at 7:09 p.m.
In the ALCS, Game 1 took 4:03, and Game 4 took 4:33, with the Boston Red Sox and Houston Astros combining to throw 344 pitches. Two other games in the ALCS approached the four-hour mark.
The first two games of the World Series lasted 3:52 and a relatively snappy 3:12, respectively.
By contrast, Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, won 10-9 by the Pittsburgh Pirates on Bill Mazeroski's walk-off homer, took just 2:36.
Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, won in the bottom of the 12th on Carlton Fisk's walk-off homer off Fenway Park's foul pole, took 4:01 to complete. No one complained, and it remains one of the greatest games ever played.
Writing after Game 1 of this year's World Series, for Yahoo Sports, national columnist Jeff Passan summed things up.
"For years, the game has barreled toward this moment in which all of its big-data shrewdness, its deification of efficiency, its obsessive granularity converged in one place," Passan wrote. "Altogether, they have produced the single largest change to baseball since integration. The question - the one that vexes a sport with an aging audience and a bleeding fan base - is whether this fidelity to winning a game is bad for the game.
"On one hand, the players are better than ever. This was evident in so many ways Tuesday. Pitchers throw harder. Hitters marry patience with punishment. Fielders radiate athleticism."
On the other hand, as Passan noted: "A long game, a lot of pitchers, a lot of hitters, a lot of pitches and a lot of strikeouts. And while the Red Sox and Dodgers are built for this excess, stockpiling hitters who toil through at-bats and filling their bullpens with a stockpile of live arms, their approaches are not some outlier. This is baseball in 2018, for better or worse."
So here we are. Whether it's for better or worse is up to the viewer, the consumer, to decide. Some love watching hitters grind out at-bats. Others long for the day when ace pitchers tossed complete games, as opposed to Chris Sale and Clayton Kershaw lasting 4 innings each in Game 1 this year.
Despite all of MLB's implementing "speedup" rules - limiting mound visits and eliminating pitches on intentional walks - one thing is certain: We're not going to see World Series games that last two hours, 36 minutes anymore.
One way to hold an audience would be to play one World Series weekend game during the day. That would allow kids to view an entire game, and it might stoke memories among us older folks of October afternoons watching the World Series with the sun casting long shadows over the playing field.
That's something I'd like to see. If baseball is going to get obliterated in the prime-time weekend ratings by football, it might as well play one game in the sunshine.
There's a lot of great stuff going on this postseason. Baseball's tough task is maximizing the enjoyment value for the largest number of fans.