The Pecan Park Eagle

Baseball is Tradition, And Patience, And Peace. And Love. And the Joy of Overcoming All Odds.

Check out David Barron’s article on Page C2 in the Sports section of this morning’s Friday, May 30, 2014 edition of the Houston Chronicle. The column highlights some discussion points from a  former players panel that was held here in Houston yesterday as part of the annual Major League Baseball Civil Rights Game that’s being played here tonight between the visiting Baltimore Orioles and the Houston Astros. During the discussion, Barron reports that MLB Network and Fox analyst Harold Reynolds thinks that waning interest in the game today is basically due to its slow pace, its loss of player personality today to sameness, and to a general lack of athleticism that shows up in players by the way they play the game today.

Reynolds may be right on some level, but those three points are a complex mouthful that I don’t think anyone can take on further in one column, let alone a weekend or week-long seminar. I jut want to raise my initial concern about the “”slow pace” factor.

I think Warren Spahn said it best, but he just gave us the half of it. In paraphrase, Spahn said, “The business of hitting in baseball is timing. The business of pitching is doing what we need to do as pitchers to upset the timing of batters so that the opposition’s hitting is unsuccessful.” He might have added, “because we know the offense is going to do everything they can to upset the timing of our disruptive efforts in ways that make the speed and type of pitches we throw more predictable.”

So, the question at large in my mind is this one: “Can we really expect to accelerate the game of baseball to a shorter, predictable speed and still have the game that so many of us came to love as players and fans. If the opposition is banging our pitchers’ brains out at a steady clip at some kind of regulated game speed, do we really want to take away the timing-tools that managers and pitchers use today to try and upset momentum? And do we really want to deprive our hitters from trying things that may rattle the disposition and timing of a pitcher who has found a performance zone in which he is having a career day?

I say no. If we want to shorten the games, let’s cut the time we spend on commercial diversions and keep the price for this 50% reduction to what it is now.

Second worst case scenario?  Baseball may not survive the short-attention spans of the 20th century fans whose primary hooks are football and basketball, but that’s OK. Baseball is not like either of those two other sports. As in chess, there is a cerebral, non-active aspect to playing with the heads of one’s opponents that is usually more  observable in baseball, if a fan knows what to look for. The worst case scenario for me would be that the game survived, but at an artificially created speed that made it more like basketball.

That would not be baseball to me. If that were our only plan, I’d sooner see her rest in peace as the happiest memory of my life.