The Worst of Baseball on Display in Game 7

It breaks my heart to observe it...but that was an awful game.

Game 7 of a great World Series wasn't just devoid of drama, it was a showcase of why baseball is turning off a lot of people. 

Talk about pace of play, this game loses a footrace to a sloth, a snail and Brian McCann.

The bottom of the 5th inning, in which Houston twice replaced the pitcher, and the catcher instigated roughly 11 visits to the mound, an inning that featured two hit batsmen but not a single run -- that half inning alone obliterated a half hour of your life. You can never get it back.

Ah, but it was heaven for advertisers. For that half inning alone, including just prior and just after the frame, you were subjected to twelve 30-second ads, not including all the announcer reads and the lovely innovation of short in-frame spots during lulls in the play.

Not to be outdone, the 6th inning, top and bottom, wasted away another half hour of your life. No pitchers were removed mid-inning and only one run scored. 

There were 284 pitches thrown in a game that produced just six runs, two of them on a single swing. Lance McCullers recorded seven outs, held L.A. scoreless and needed 49 pitches.

Y-a-w-n.

I mean that literally: the game was nearly three hours old with a third of the way to go. 

I went to bed. In the middle of Game 7 of the World Series. I have never done that before.

I would have stayed up all night to see the World Series play out. But it wasn't playing out; it was droning on, withering before our eyes. This was basically a series of advertisements punctuated by mound conferences. 

Evidently I didn't miss a thing. The combined 14 innings of one-run ball pitched by the two teams' "relievers" would have been exciting to start the game, but with the score already 5-0 it was a snoozefest. So I decided to snooze for real.

There is plenty of time in the off-season for deeper thoughts on the underlying causes of this and how bad it is for baseball. I've long advocated for a rule preventing a pitching change if the pitcher on the mound hasn't yielded a run in that frame. But this isn't the time for that.

It should be the time to celebrate the Astros and their first World Championship in 56 years of existence. It's exhilarating to see a team dogpile in ecstasy at the conclusion.

But I was deep into REM sleep by then.