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.

Ray Charles Could See Why the NBA Playoffs Are So Dull

Following a six-month marathon, the NBA selects the very best 16 teams to compete in the post-season for a title. The competitiveness of these contests is demonstrated by the scores:

104-78
108-70
123-91
106-74
115-95
89-72
94-68
115-103

The average margin of victory in the first batch of face-offs -- 21 points.

Many hoops analysts are pulling their hair out over the snoozefest that is the first round. They are torturing themselves to explain this mysterious phenomenon. The answer is right under Jimmy Durante's nose.

Even Stevie Wonder can see why the games are such stultifying blowouts. Too many teams are allowed into the playoffs. The mediocre enter the postseason alongside the magnificent; indeed, they match up against them. Golden State is the greatest regular season team in NBA history. They are playing a dysfunctional Houston outfit that needed a late streak to reach .500. It's a mismatch.

Likewise San Antonio, with the game's seventh best record all time, pairing up with downtrodden Memphis, ravaged by injuries and limping down the stretch. It's a Major League team playing a Double-A team. It's not fair. It's not fun to watch. It doesn't tell us anything.

Helen Keller could have told you: the first round of NBA playoffs is rubbish. Eliminate half the qualifiers and all the mismatches. That would improve the playoffs and give the regular season some meaning.

Johnny Manziel could figure that out.