I have a friend who doesn’t like to do things after work during the week. Such is his unyielding commitment to what he calls “getting settled, doing my admin, and clambering into bed at a reasonable hour”, he’s placed himself in exile from certain activities one might otherwise enjoy: concerts, the theatre, the movies, going to dinner with friends like a normal person. Also on his shitlist are baseball games. “I can’t be at a ball park at 11 o’clock on a Tuesday!” he likes to wail, plaintively.
I can sympathise. Baseball, for its many glories, is long and meandering, and the prospect of watching a live game when the clock strikes midnight is not once to set the heart racing. If you’ve been at a ball game at the bottom of the ninth, with the visiting team ahead by one, and not thought to yourself, please, please, don’t anybody score, then you’re a gigantic liar. The dismay around the stadium when a game goes into extra innings is keenly felt. Another half-hour at least! Literally no one wants extra innings. We’ve spent way too much money on substandard pork products and beer, and now we just want to go home.
Major League Baseball has a problem with time, particularly in the playoffs. Last year’s postseason was excruciating. Games frequently went beyond the four-hour mark. An 18-inning Game 2 marathon between San Francisco and Washington in the National League Division Series lasted a record six hours and 23 minutes. Was anybody watching in that 18th inning? Were the players still awake? Six and a half hours, on a weeknight! Where’s the humanity?
As usual, advertising is largely to blame. Postseason commercial breaks are almost three minutes long – 30 seconds longer than a national telecast during the regular season, and 50 seconds longer than a typical local broadcast. The sensation that you know that smug git from the Chevrolet adverts more intimately than your own family is not a pleasant one.
But strategy plays a role, too. If we’ve learned one thing from MLB’s lamentable decision to boil a 162-game regular season down to one wild card crapshoot, it’s that every pitch counts. In the postseason, every error is magnified. Managers chop and change their roster, pitching coaches take to the mound, opinion is sought. During Wednesday night’s NL wild-card game between the Pirates and the Cubs, both teams’ benches cleared after Jake Arrieta was hit by an errant pitch by Tony Watson, the players heading to the plate almost more by obligation than desire. Whole minutes elapsed before order was restored. It’s the postseason! Gotta make the most of it.
And, of course, there are the sundries: the non-sporting gimmicks and stunts that make ball games so lengthy. The seventh-inning stretch, for example. The Yankees grounds crew dancing to YMCA as they sweep the dirt. (There’s the separate question of whether a Village People track can ever be effectively rendered by a group of middle-aged men in relaxed-fit chinos, but that’s a debate for another day.) Shooting T-shirts into the air from pop guns. Mascots acting zany. Kiss cam.
Baseball has at least acknowledged its problem with pacing, and rules have been introduced to quicken things up. There’s now a time limit during pitching changes, no-pitch intentional walks, the batter’s box rule. As so often, officials are thinking of the children. “We’ve lost a generation,” says MLB umpire supervisor Cris Jones. That generation – what newspapers like to refer to as ‘millennials’ – isn’t playing ball with the major leagues: they’re more interested in texting and selfies, not watching bored outfielders picking the skin off their fingers.
I mentioned kiss cam. It’s taken a bit of a pounding recently, and some have suggested it be ditched for good. Too lengthy, too corny, the critics say. Syracuse University last month pulled the plug on its cam at the Carrier Dome after a local resident complained about the overzealous kissing captured on the big screen. “The instances I witnessed at the game encourage and condone sexual assault and a sense of male entitlement, at best. And they are an actual instance of assault, at worst,” Stephen Port wrote to the Post-Standard.
The New York Mets put in place a well-meaning but ill-advised kiss cam feature where two players from the opposing team would be coaxed into kissing each other, to whoops and hollers from the crowd. The Mets received numerous complaints over the notion that two men kissing is a hilarious joke to be laughed at, and the club last month sheepishly pulled the feature.
Quite right. Kiss cam, generally speaking, is fun, and people enjoy it, but, rather like plutonium-239 and hypnosis, it must be used correctly. President Carter’s on-screen smooch with Rosalynn at a Braves game in September was legitimately adorable, but forcing a kiss upon two people who don’t want to is not cool. Boston Globe columnist Kevin Paul Dupont has the right idea: “If a woman or man obviously doesn’t want the kiss, then move the lens, kill the shot. It’s a big arena. There are thousands of others in the crowd, heterosexuals and same-sex couples alike, who will be happy to pucker up.”
Baseball shouldn’t kill kiss cam; it just needs to do it right. Yes, it’s cheesy, and gratuitous, but ball games can endure a short break to turn to the jumbotron, and professional baseball doesn’t need to become any more po-faced. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
