If You Hate Long Baseball Games, then Go to Bed
It took the Houston Astros over five hours on Sunday night to beat the Los Angeles Dodgers, and half the Internet got all pissy because they missed their bedtime.
If you hate baseball because games are long, then you hate baseball. Go to bed.
Sunday night's Game 5 of the 2017 World Series is now the second-longest Series game on record.
It was Heaven for fans that love the longball and Hell for stupid idiots who apparently mainlined melatonin in the 7th inning because they've never seen a game of playoff baseball before.
The teams combined to ding seven home runs (2 for LA, 5 for Houston). The Astros became the first team to have five different players hit homers in a single World Series game. In another insane statistic, the Internet came together for a combined 80 million complaints about how MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred whipped it out and pissed all over everyone’s REM cycle.
(I fully recognize there have been many other complaints about the playoffs in general -- juiced balls, hanging sliders, and squeezed strike zones, but I’ll focus on game length.)
Kansas City Royals first baseman Eric Hosmer also couldn’t stay awake for the game (although his Tweet announcing this was light-hearted).
Don't worry, Eric! In steps Kansas City Star columnist Lee Judge, who won't stand for this! Judge used his vapidly-named “Judging the Royals” column to wail and moan: “If you can’t get Eric Hosmer to watch an entire World Series game, you might have a problem.”
Lee, you have a problem, and it’s your attitude. Go to bed.
USA TODAY Sports writer Erik Brady, in this Oct. 23 piece, talked to fans about the pace of games, and many of the interviewees clearly start steeping their Sleepy Time tea in the 8th inning hoping for a prompt bottom-of-the-9th walk-off bedtime.
"We heard complaints about pitchers taking too long to pitch, batters adjusting their batting gloves, multiple visits to the mound by catchers — minutes spattered all over the place," Brady wrote.
He then quotes a fan from Arlington, Va., named Burt Solomon: "In this day and age, slow is boring, and boring is death."
Holy goddamn shit, Burt, consider a PTO day.
Craig Calcaterra of NBC Sports says he doesn’t mind long games, but he’s looking out for us, the working class folk who have commitments, and bedtimes, and Outlook reminders to stir the Crock-Pot roast promptly at 7 a.m.
“People have lives and jobs and stuff and unless you’re a hardcore fan … you’re not likely to invest your time in a ballgame if doing so commits you to three and a half or four hours of time every single time out,” Calcaterra wrote earlier this month.
As a fellow human, I know what he means. I have a life and a job and, occasionally, stuff.
Then there’s God’s gift to mankind, 14-year-old Andon Byrd, who told USA TODAY that he watches games in their entirety, unless it’s a school night, bless him.
"Byrd dismisses the notion that the long-term popularity of the game will be harmed if the pace of play remains the same," USA TODAY's Brady wrote, quoting Andon: “You either love the game and watch it, or you don’t.”
BLESS HIM.
Why do games have to be so long though, rabble rabble?!
Sportswriter Grant Brisbee tackles the complaint in this long-read analysis titled “Why Baseball Games Are So Damned Long.” (That piece is very good, and you should read it.)
Brisbee analyzed two games that were nearly identical statistically, but differed in length by around an hour. One game was played in 1984, the other in 2014. What he ultimately lands on is that the root cause of lengthy games is not as clear as curmudgeons like Lee Judge want. It’s not just the commercials, or the four-pitch intentional walks, or the coaches’ long trots out to the mound. High level, the game is just being played slower.
“There was a video review that took four minutes in the 2014 game, but that wasn’t the biggest problem. There were extra commercials, but that wasn’t the biggest problem. The difference between the two games, 30 years apart, was that baseball players are lollygagging more. … Pitchers don’t get rid of the ball like they used to. Hitters aren’t expecting them to get rid of the ball like they used to.”
Sunday night's game had plenty of pitching changes -- fourteen total pitchers, throwing a cumulative 417 pitches. All of this can add a couple minutes here or there, which leads to an additional twenty, thirty, or forty-five minutes by the end of the night.
If you sincerely care about any of that, go OD on ZzzQuil.
Baseball isn't fun to watch anymore! RABBLE!!
Despite having seven home runs and four lead changes in Sunday night’s game, wet-diaper shitbirds still find ways to complain about long games lacking action.
To be sure, the Wall Street Journal found that there is on average 18 minutes of action in a given baseball game. The average game is around 3 hours long which, to idiots, equates to “I’m just sitting around for 2 hours and 45 minutes doing nothing!” You chose to consume baseball and are now complaining. You bought an apple and you wanted a screwdriver. I don't know how to help you.
If you hate it, turn it off. If you spent $50 to get inside a ballpark, and it's the bottom of the 10th, then leave. This isn’t complicated.
(For comparison, there is an average of 11 minutes of action in an NFL game, but don’t worry, there are still 600 minutes of truck commercials. In related news, football is the worst, and its fans are a plague.)
In his latest column, Brisbee jokes that Sunday's game broke baseball. He gets it. The heart of his column is what I love about the game: Baseball is weird. Players hit home runs on their first major league at-bat off the first pitch. Birds (and balls) explode. A teammate dies and their friend smacks a home run in their honor. Cats and squirrels run onto the field. Games go 13 innings and end in walk-off walks. For better or worse, this is what you signed up for.
“Baseball is broken, baseball is redeemed, baseball is the best, baseball is the worst," Brisbee writes. "It took more than five hours for the Dodgers and Astros to play Game 5, and it felt like 100 hours of baseball was packed into it."
The MLB this season already instituted rules to quicken pace of play, with more rules probably coming in 2018. One of those new restrictions could be instituting a 20-second shot clock per pitch. Of course, people are already bitching about that. Not to mention, they accidentally set their alarm to “PM,” and now they’re late for work.
And, despite the new rules put into place, the average game time this season actually went up by 4 ½ minutes, according to the MLB’s commissioner’s office. This is hilarious to me because I don’t care. I still love baseball.
If you really care, then go to bed. This isn’t for you.
