Enough With the Pace of Game Arguments

Baseball doesn't have a pace of game problem. Baseball has an image problem.

On average, baseball games last season lasted about 3 hours and 13 minutes, roughly the same as an NFL game. But the important thing to remember is that there's only about 11 minutes of stuff actually happening in an NFL game compared to 18 minutes of stuff happening in a baseball game. So really, you're actually getting more for your money watching a baseball game than you are watching an NFL game. But that's not the perception.

The common belief is that baseball is wildly boring while the NFL is the most exciting game on Earth. We're talking marketing at this point rather than talking about the actual games.

The truth is, you could cut baseball game times by 10-15 minutes and many fans would still think baseball will put you to sleep. The changes Major League Baseball has considered are only cosmetic. They do nothing to address the larger issue, which is perception.

If the powers that be wanted to overhaul baseball's image, they'd have to massively restructure the game and enact drastic measures like changing the number of outs in an inning, the amounts of innings in a game, and the amount of players allowed to hit in a lineup.

Or maybe you could change the name of the game to "feetball" and have a pitcher roll the ball to the plate with the batter (footer?) having to kick the ball into play. That's the kind of change it would take for casual fans to really think of baseball as a different game.

But making a guy step back into the batter's box during an at bat or establishing a pitch clock doesn't change anything. Baseball shouldn't even bother.

Red Sox DH David Ortiz makes a good point when he complains that forcing him to change his at bat routine is hardly going to make much of a difference, and, in fact, it's going to reduce the quality of play because it will remove a strategic part of the batter vs. pitcher dynamic.

"When you come out of the box, they don't understand you're thinking about what the [pitcher] is trying to do," Ortiz told reporters this week. "This is not like, you go to the plate with an empty mind. No, no, no. When you see a guy, after a pitch, coming out of the box, he's not just doing it. Our minds are speeding up. I saw one pitch, I come out, I'm thinking, 'What is this guy going to try to do to me next?' I'm not walking around just because there are cameras all over the place and I want my buddies back home to see me and this and that. It doesn't go that way."

He continued: "I'm not going to change my game. I don't care what they say. My game, it's not like I go around and do all kinds of stupid shit. But I have to take my time and think about what that [pitcher] is going to do next. I'm pretty sure every single hitter at this level is on the same page."

Soccer games roughly last about two hours when you factor in half time and stoppage time. The ball is continuously moving. And yet a large faction of the American sports audience believe soccer is too slow paced. So it isn't so much about game time. It's about what is perceived as "action." There are no dunks, no hard hitting collisions, and no fights in soccer.

So even while the sport is more popular now in the U.S. than ever before, soccer still has somewhat of an image problem with casual American fans. So does baseball.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when baseball got pegged as your grandfather's sport, but it's certainly happened. Maybe it's because we've become such a star obsessed society that baseball suffered because it has done a poor job of marketing itself compared to the NFL and NBA. Maybe it's because mainstream American fans can't relate to a sport where nearly 30 percent of the player pool was born in a foreign country. Who knows? All I know is that the pace of games is just a tiny bit of the problem.

This type of argument is the same misnomer the journalism world has fallen into with the discussion about article length. The thought is that people in this modern society of smart phones and Twitter won't read long articles because of a lack of attention span. As a result, publishers enact strict word counts. But article length is only part of the problem. Like with baseball pace of game arguments, this blames the reader/viewer rather than the actual product.

The real problem with long articles is that many of them aren't actually well written or researched; also, there are numerous places where to find news now, so overall circulation/unique visitor numbers for most media entities are naturally going to dip because readers are visiting many different sites; and, perhaps most importantly, newspapers failed to find a way to monetize the internet, which led to a loss of revenue that led to a reduction in staff and resources, which in turn reduced the quality of long articles.

Again, the length itself is not the actual problem.

Think of Ortiz's argument about pitcher and batter matchups in the context of a writer being told he/she has to adhere to a strict word count: "But I need a large amount of space to fully articulate my thoughts" is not so far removed from "When you come out of the box, they don't understand you're thinking about what the [pitcher] is trying to do."

For example, could my friend Jeff Passan from Yahoo! make an argument that Ortiz is a whiner in less than the almost 1,200 words he used in his recent column? Perhaps. But Passan probably appreciates the liberty and freedom to use all the words he needs to use, just like Ortiz appreciates the ability to use all the time he has available to think about what pitch is coming next.

So in the end it's not about how much time you take or how many words you use. It's about what you do with it.