Alan Truex: A long cold night of baseball, hardly a Fall Classic
I don’t know exactly how long Game 2 of the World Series lasted. I never made it to the end, and I’ve been unable to locate a full box score that includes the time of game. Box scores are deemed useless in this day of analytics. I can’t blame MLB for wanting to keep time of game a secret. This was a tightly played 4-2 decision, the kind that took two hours, ten minutes back in the day when baseball was America’s favorite televised sport.
Before this game was halfway over, I was losing interest. This was the most one-sided 4-2 game I’ve ever seen most of. The LA Dodgers were thoroughly outplayed, at bat, in the field, on the mound, by the Boston Red Sox, who were never seriously threatened after J.D. Martinez drove in two in the 5th inning.
The completion process took way too long, and I’ve never been one to complain of the leisurely pace of baseball. To those who griped about lack of action, I’ve pointed out that there are more minutes of action in the average baseball game than in football.
But Wednesday night, for the first time, I had to admit the critics are right about baseball.
Nine-inning ballgames that last 3 ½ hours with six runs are a dreadful bore. Give me soccer, give me cricket, they have more action and more drama than what I saw Wednesday night at polar Fenway Park.
I haven’t seen the numbers on how many TV viewers stayed to the end, especially those in the Eastern time zone of the Boston Red Sox. Most had to be at work by 8 the next morning.
This game was two hours old before it staggered to the end of the fifth inning.
Unable to make it that far was the starting pitcher of the Dodgers, Hyun-Jin Ryu. He grew up in South Korea, unaccustomed to playing baseball at 43 degrees. Though he did his best to be stoic, Ryu did not look like he was enjoying his work. And I wasn’t enjoying watching it.
For three seasons of the year Boston is as wonderful a city as there is. But its blazing, soaring autumn is over. The long winter has set in, and it’s bittersweet leaning evermore to bitter.
The Boston pitchers were blowing on their hands, and network announcers at Fenway were clothed like Alpine skiers. This is not the proper stage for baseball’s most historic event.
I lasted longer than Ryu – to the beginning of the seventh inning. It was getting late for me, so I recorded the part I did not watch live. On Thursday morning I replayed the 7th inning to discern clues about why the World Series was so tedious.
I stop-watched the scoreless 7th and timed it at 23 minutes from the first pitch to the last. If every inning were 23 minutes you would have a game time of 3 ¾ hours. What made this paceless inning more annoying than most was no scoring, not even the threat of a run. The Dodgers were entirely overwhelmed by a Boston bullpen throwing an average fastball of 98+ mph.
So here are a few factors contributing to drudgery:
- Max Muncy, Dodgers’ pinch-hitter, stepped out of the batter’s box between every pitch. Obviously the rules about speeding up the game are suspended during the World Series.
- Kenta Maeda, Dodgers’ reliever, took at least 23 seconds between every delivery. Several times he exceeded 30 seconds. He paused for 50 seconds to kick dirt off his spikes.
- Between-innings time is padded by excessive commercialization. Teams do not need four minutes to take their positions. And unlike the Super Bowl, there’s no attempt at cleverness in World Series marketing. Hey, that’s baseball.
To hell with tradition, during the seventh-inning stretch we saw no stretching, no panorama of a joyful crowd not at all chilled by the temperature. We did not hear Take Me Out to the Ballgame. We got to watch six more commercials.
And any time there’s a pinch hitter, there’s an advertising intrusion.
MLB might consider that less could be more. Reduce the advertising, increase viewership, raise the advertising rate, make more money.
Here’s another idea: Compress the schedule, add a few day-nighters, figure out a way to keep the World Series from bumping into November.
This great bore of a World Series is so much in contrast to last year’s, even though the games were just as elongated. I didn’t complain last year because of the constant back-and-forth dramatics.
This Series won’t be a lot more fun when it shifts to Southern California for Game 3 Friday night. The Dodgers will be warmer but can’t be comfortable knowing only 20% of teams down 2-0 have won the World Series.
This one is not going to attract the millennial market that MLB hopes to secure. I’m not sure the bloated product it’s putting out will satisfy many of the fans it has now.
