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.
Dreaming of the upcoming season. Wouldn't it be great if...
Someone did a home run dance in the sixth inning of a 7-2 game . . . and no once paid any attention? You want to stop gratuitous celebrations? The sound of one hand clapping would do it.
A batter laid down a bunt to break up a no-hitter in the ninth inning of a 3-0 game, invoking the ire of the opposing team and leading to a plunking, a two-base error and a double that tied the game and unwrote the unwritten rule?
Ken "Hawk" Harrelson retired and someone who knew something about baseball in the 21st century replaced him? Then fans on Chicago's South Side would have at least one thing to celebrate this year.
Umpires ordered batters to stop fooling around and get in the box and demanded that pitchers serve up the ball within 20 seconds as required by the rules? And games started moving along?
Jake Arrieta really is as good as the second half of last season?
Because that would mean that in 2016 he'd allow a .409 OPS and an ERA of
0.75. He'd allow four home runs all season.
A fan bopped by a batted ball admitted it was their own damn fault for not paying attention?
The players on a last place squad began extolling the team's chemistry? Funny, you never hear that.
Someone connected to a club 10 games under .500 announced that his team had just acquired "momentum" and then they went out and won 13 of the next 15 games? Then we
would finally have one verifiable example of the spirit magic that gives rise to that term.
Baseball writers and announcers all had to take a course and pass an exam on new analysis and be able to explain triple-slash stats, Fielding Independent Pitching, True Average, BABIP and Wins Against Replacement? That way fans would learn about them and we would all better understand the game.
Baseball announcers, particularly play-by-play guys (as opposed to analysts) had to pass an oral communication exam? Then we would stop hearing idiotic phrases like "controlling their own destiny," grounds rule double, and "second-chance opportunities." (Destiny cannot be controlled and chances are opportunities.) Announcers would understand basic sentence structure, common idioms, proper usage and diction, and generally sound like experts in communication rather than like Norm Crosby.
Mike Trout did it again, and then again and again through age 30? He'd have 96 WAR with half his career ahead of him.
