Hey guys! Baseball games can be long sometimes and Rick Reilly is ON IT!
Reilly talks about the pace of the game and makes the current, cutting-edge observation that players step out of the batter’s box a lot, commercials are long and so forth. The game that raised his ire:Cincinnati at San Francisco was a three-hour-and-14-minute can-somebody-please-stick-two-forks-in-my-eyes snore-a-palooza. Like a Swedish movie, it might have been decent if somebody had cut 90 minutes out of it. I’d rather have watched eyebrows grow. And I should have known better ...
... Buster Posey of the Giants, The Man Who Wrecked Your Dinner Reservations, has this habit of coming to the box, stopping outside it and unfastening and refastening his gloves before his FIRST SWING! What exactly was he doing in the on-deck circle? His cuticles?
Sorry you’d rather be out to eat than covering a baseball game, Rick. Coverage which is costing your employer a reported $1.5 million a year. It must be a chore.
Seriously, though, Reilly has a core of a point here about umpires not enforcing the rule which requires pitchers to throw the ball within 12 seconds of receiving it. But then he completely undermines his point by (a) complaining about baseball rules which have been on the book for 150 years such as pickoff throws; and (b) making jokes in which the punchline is merely “Obamacare!”
And of course he finishes undermining his point when he says:Three hours and 14 minutes, 170 step-outs, and three double-shot macchiatos for that?
Please, I beg of you, bring on the NFL.
Oh, you mean the NFL which just moved back kickoff times of its late games to accommodate even longer games with even longer commercial interruptions? So that now an early game is given 3:25 to be done? That’s what will save you from the 3:14 baseball hell? The wall-to-wall action of the NFL?
Why doesn’t Reilly just admit he doesn’t much care for baseball so he decided to write a column complaining about things that would have been stale on Bill Cosby’s early comedy albums?
UPDATE: Shocker: this is not the first time Reilly has beaten this horse. Except when he did it 12 years ago, he claimed he’d never watch baseball on TV again.
(thanks to Kopy for the heads up)