Baseball, the great (and slow) American pastime – Chicago Tribune

Major League Baseball games are too long, attention spans are too short, the fan base is aging and the next generation of fans — kids playing baseball — is down more than 40 percent in the past 15 years . The folks who run MLB are worried. Last year they started enforcing some existing rules — like the batter has to keep a foot in the box between pitches — and game lengths decreased by about eight minutes. But even still, a baseball game today is almost half an hour longer than it was some 20 years ago when it took about 21/2 hours.

Now there’s talk of fining players who take too much time between pitches, and a few true heretics have posed the idea of cutting the game down to seven innings. Here’s a simpler idea: stop all the warming up.

I love baseball the way Cubs fans loved baseball until they beat my Cleveland Indians in the best Game 7 ever, a game I was at — with unconditional awe and superstition and a healthy dose of fear. But I can make the argument that a professional baseball game sometimes seems like a series of practice sessions punctuated by some live action. Do the infielders really need to take four or five grounders between every inning? That’s 10 practice sessions — one before the game and one before every inning.

How would you like to go to a Broadway play where the actors come out before each scene and do a couple of run-throughs? Clear their throats. Sing a few bars of a song they’re about to perform. Even the great orchestras of the world only warm up twice — once before the start of the performance and once after intermission. They are trying to get something like 100 instruments in tune and they just need a couple of minutes.