Well, that was quick

[rsc]

susandennis, whatever your guys and the Jays were doing this evening, let's bottle it and send it to all the other teams (especially the Red Sox)! I mean, too bad about the result, but 1 hour and 59 minutes? Really?

We were at Fenway at the time, for a game that lasted 3:40 -- at least the Sox surprised everybody and won handily. But I looked over at the out-of-town scoreboard during the (interminable) 4th inning and saw that the Mariners-Jays game, which had started maybe 4 minutes before ours, was already in the 8th, and thought "how did they do that?"

Comments

[susandennis]

Send 'em Home Early Burhle. That guy does not fuck around and sets a fine pace.

[lcohen]

i was wondering, when i saw it was the jays, if buehrle was the pitcher. get ball, throw ball. keeps your infielders alert.

[susandennis]

Yep. He makes the game fun for everyone. Our pitcher was a young guy who picked right up on the pace.

[rsc.livejournal.com]

I'm all for pitchers working quickly. But slow pitchers are not the only ones at fault; batters who step out after every pitch don't help, nor do umpires who enable them (which is all of them).

A casual observer of the game of baseball might well conclude that a player can call time whenever he likes. This is not the case; players do not call time, umpires do. If a player asks for time, the umpire is under no obligation to grant the request. I'd like to see umpires stop calling time once the pitcher has started his motion; the batter steps out at his peril.

That said, I looked at the box score and noted that each side received exactly one walk. In our game, Tampa Bay pitchers issued 9 walks; this contributed not only to the unusually high number of runs scored by our guys (11), but also to the inordinate length of the game.

MLB is supposedly going to address length-of-game issues for the coming season. It will be interesting to see if they come up with anything that actually reduces the length of games.