Bring Back Day Games
Posted on October 31st, 2007 in Uncategorized | 19 Comments »
In the Bangor Daily News, columnist Ron Brown writes about an issue that I think everyone agrees with but I haven’t seen much written about: The fact that the World Series games went so late, they were almost impossible to watch.
Seemed to me that the first pitch generally started around 8:40, and so the games pretty much went past midnight.
Because it was such a dull World Series, I didn’t stay up for any last outs, but there are a lot of people wandering around Boston this week who need to catch up on their sleep.
(Also, get a life, but that’s a separate issue.)
More important, these late games make it impossible for children to watch…so how will baseball cultivate its fans this way?
The game I’m writing about, the 1978 Yankee-Red Sox playoff, started at 2:30 PM. And the starting time was one reason why it became such a memorable event for so many people roughly my ageâit marked a break in their schedule. Schools let out early, some kids watched in their school auditoriums….
But as Bucky Dent said to me when I interviewed him (take that, Sox fans), how different would it have been if that had been a night game?
If not day games, how about at least a 7:30 start time next year?
19 Responses
10/31/2007 8:50 am
Get a life? Richard’s a tad cranky this morning.
10/31/2007 8:59 am
Nah, just teasing.
10/31/2007 10:11 am
Bucky Dent’s still alive?
10/31/2007 10:17 am
Staying up past midnight precludes children watching? Rich, get a child. They don’t go to bed before midnight anymore!
10/31/2007 10:55 am
And again, Richard forgets about all the people who DON’T live in the Eastern Time Zone.
10/31/2007 10:58 am
Here is a column from someone who used to agree with you, but changed his mind.
The gist of it is, basically, there are TONS of opportunities to watch baseball now. Way more than there were in 1978. So, how can you complain about how boring these games were and that no one had a chance to watch them? Kids had plenty of opportunities to watch games all year — games that were much more involving than these.
10/31/2007 11:07 am
When one of the teams playing in the World Series is from the eastern time zone, it would make sense to play the game at a reasonable hour for both people who work and children (mabe 2/3 of the entire population) to watch. Like a 6 pm EST start, plus or minus an hour?
My 11 and 13 year old children go to bed at 9 p.m. (get a backbone, people — midnight?) because their school bus comes at 7:05 a.m.
This is a well-timed topic on the day after a new study comes out about the extreme sensitivity of childrens’ academic performance to sleep deprivation…
At any rate, I suppose its really about advertising $ and not conflicting with NFL broadcasts too much.
10/31/2007 12:26 pm
Hmmmm, good idea. I think Richard does need a child.Let me know if you need some help with that, hon. (wink)
10/31/2007 2:14 pm
“My 11 and 13 year old children go to bed at 9 p.m. (get a backbone, people — midnight?).”
Hear hear!
10/31/2007 2:47 pm
Yes, that struck me as kinda late too.
10/31/2007 3:15 pm
All this is correct, but can’t they also do something about every damned batter now doing the Nomar thing of stepping out of the batting box and re-fastening his Velcro after every pitch? Even if you started at 7:30 PM, the EARLIEST these WS games would have ended is 11PM! If the umpires can’t make them speed up, maybe you need - gasp!! - a clock in baseball. (College ball seems to do fine without one, as does minor league baseball, but the major leagues just have too much preening.)
I haven’t thought this through, but how about a chess clock for time out of the batter’s box? So any individual batter in a clutch situation could take his time, but only if his teammates batting with the bases empty didn’t waste time dressing and undressing between pitches. Each team might be allowed X seconds per pitch for time out of the batter’s box, accumulated across the whole team and the whole game. (Don’t ask me what the penalty would be.) You’d have to do something similar for the pitchers, I guess - time off the rubber, say.
Of course, if the economic incentives are for longer games (more beer sold in the ball park, for example), then such ideas are beside the point.
10/31/2007 4:03 pm
The umpires can easily make them speed up. In baseball, the player does not call a timeout. He requests a timeout from the umpire, who agrees or not, at his discretion. If all of the umpires said to the players before each game “Once you’re in the batter’s box, I’m not calling time unless you lose a contact lens,” the games would be a little faster and have much better pacing. Batters should never get out of the batter’s box; once you get in there, stay in and hit.
10/31/2007 4:10 pm
3:15 here. That sounds like a much better idea than a rule change. So does the economics prevent it, or is it the power of the players’ union, which does not want either batters or pitchers to be rushed?
10/31/2007 4:20 pm
3:15/4:03 - You people obviously have no appreciation for baseball. Sometimes it’s a slow game. Deal with it. If I’m going to the ballpark, I want to have a nice relaxing afternoon/evening, with plenty of time to drink beer.
Besides, I don’t think batters calling for time adds nearly as much to the length of a game as pitchers and their shenanigans.
10/31/2007 5:00 pm
4:03 here again. The umpires can also do something about the pitchers if they want to. The official rules say that the pitcher has to throw within 12 seconds of the pitcher receiving the ball and the batter stepping into the batter’s box. If the pitcher delays too long, it’s supposed to be called a ball (if there are no runners on) or a balk (if there are runners on). I doubt many pitchers actually exceed 12 seconds, but the rule does exist.
I don’t know how much either one of those changes the lengths of the games, but a short delay between every single pitch completely changes the way the game is experienced. I think it takes away a lot of tension and excitement.
10/31/2007 5:35 pm
4:03 - I won’t deny that the delays sometimes take away some excitement from the game. But that’s baseball. If you tinkered with it a whole bunch to make it more continuously exciting, you’d have to change so many rules that it’d stop being baseball pretty quick.
All that said, i think we’ve lost sight of the more important thing — namely, THE RED SOX WON THE WORLD SERIES! AGAIN!
10/31/2007 5:38 pm
Also, so long as we’re bringing back things from how baseball used to be, how about scheduled single-admission doubleheaders? Now, doubleheaders only happen when there’s make-up games to play. That’s dumb.
10/31/2007 6:05 pm
3:15 here. No, 4:20, that’s not baseball. That’s major league baseball. Go to a minor league or college game. It’s fun. You discover that the stories you tell between innings have to be shorter, that’s all.
I still would like to know if this is an artifact of unionized baseball or of baseball that becomes more profitable the longer the games are. Seriously, I am puzzled about that. TV can’t sell any more ads just because there are delays between pitches, so I would have thought that the broadcasters would have an interest in keeping the games short. Of course they can and do sell more ad time by making the time between innings longer, which probably accounts for a lot of the lengthening of games.
I accept that changing the rules is a lousy idea, given that the rules already have a way of dealing with this problem. I wish someone could explain why MLB seems to have no interest in having the umpires enforce them.
10/31/2007 6:20 pm
3:15 - it could be the union, I guess, but when there’s a question about why things happen as they do in baseball, I almost always end up using my go-to explanation: the people who run MLB (and most teams) are absolute morons. They are too stupid even to recognize their own self-interest. Maybe this is partly a result of their monopoly status and anti-trust exemption, but just look at Selig — that guy’s the biggest goober on the planet and it just ain’t more complicated than that.