I somehow missed it, but it seems a few months ago Joe Posnanski wrote somewhat scathingly about attempts to scale back the time-killing/wasting in baseball games.
This surprises me! Joe's not usually the reactionary, kneejerk-traditionalist sort of baseball fan. And make no mistake, Joe's a fan.
Anyway, he's come around to my way of thinking about this:
Thursday, I was in Toledo to do a story on minor league home run champion Mike Hessman, and I watched my first baseball game with a clock. And I’ll just say it right out because there’s no point in playing games here: I was 100% wrong. I was so totally, ridiculously and absurdly wrong that, frankly, I want to write an angry email in response to myself. It is hardly the first time I was this wrong. It won’t be the last.
We all come to various Truths in our own time, and I'm just glad Joe's come around to this one. If we were starting over, designing a nifty new game with one guy throwing a ball to another guy who's trying to hit the ball with a big stick, and a bunch of other guys trying to corral the ball if struck, we wouldn't permit any of the guys to just stand around doing nothing particular while everybody else waits for something to happen. We just wouldn't.
Yet somehow because it's been happening that way for so long, there are still people who think the game's actually better and more interesting this way.
Except it's not, unless you're one of those people.
Limiting the time between pitches is a good thing. Yes, the less obtrusive and obvious the methods, the better. But as Joe explains so well, with the help of his daughters, baseball's a better game when people are actually playing baseball.
