Yankees Fans: “I Don’t Care If I Ever Get Back” – Do You?

Yankees fans will swarm the gates at Yankee Stadium on Opening Day and beyond. How many of them do you think will be hoping that they get home six minutes sooner rather than later? Commissioner Manfred is obsessed with the length of games. He’s on target, but off base. And here’s why.

As a Yankees fan, I am forever reminded that it is the game of baseball that drew me to the Yankees in the first place. Because I can still recall the image of walking up the ramp leading to the third deck grandstand for the first time as a Little Leaguer, and gasping at the plush green grass and outfield that seemed to stretch forever.

And holy geez, there are the monuments on the field, 461 feet from home plate, just like they showed them on TV. And I can recall the disappointment in missing batting practice as well as the disappointment that came when Joe Altobelli smashed an opposite field double off Ralph Terry that ended a scoreless game in the eighth inning.

I was disappointed because the hit not only ended a no-hitter by Terry, but when Altobelli came around to score, the chances of extra innings grew smaller.

Yankees Fans Want More Baseball, Not Less

Extra innings. More baseball! Not less, Commissioner. You see, when I join in with the ritual singing of “Take Me Out To The Ballgame,” I mean it when I warble off-key, of course, that I don’t care if I ever get back. And, I believe many Yankees fans feel the same way.

Commissioner Manfred points, for instance, to the time it takes for a relief pitcher to walk in from the bullpen and get his eight warm-up pitches before play resumes again. And with the game of baseball changing to one that emphasizes relief pitching, that time increases exponentially with each pitching change. I get that.

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But, let me ask you this. When the gates opened and Mariano Rivera strode through them in the top of the ninth with the Yankees leading 3-2, and Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” blaring through the sound system, didn’t you want that moment to last forever?

And surely, you weren’t one of those Wall Street types who left their luxury box in the sixth inning and were crossing the George Washington Bridge, on their way home to New Jersey when Rivera unleashed that nasty cutter for the third out in the ninth.

Here’s another “slow down” Manfred is obsessed with. It’s the time it takes for a hitter to make his way from the on-deck circle to the batter’s box so that play can resume. I get that one too, and it can be nerve wrecking for everyone.

But at the same time, wasn’t it entertaining to watch Wade Boggs go through any number of ritualistic motions and touches, repeated the same way before each pitch? And wasn’t it even more entertaining to watch Mark “The Bird” Fidrych pat the dirt around the mound, while performing other landscaping chores before delivering his next pitch.

But in reality, it’s nothing more than the difference between setting the cruise on 70 instead of 65 on the highway

Commissioner Manfred was proud of the fact that he trimmed six minutes off the length of games by manufacturing ways to reduce the length of games in 2015. And he probably isn’t as happy today when the time of games ticked back up a bit in 2016.

But in reality, it’s nothing more than the difference between setting the cruise on 70 instead of 65 on the highway. The difference is only five minutes either way as to when you arrive home. And if that makes all the difference in the world to someone, then maybe we’re dealing with some psychological issue here.

Here’s What Manfred Is Not Telling Us, Though

The thing is, though, that the Commissioner is not forthright with us. He’s making it appear that it’s all about the folks in the stands, who can’t wait to get home. It’s not that, though. It’s about the TV audience, and the revenue that generates from billion dollar contracts teams have, like the one the Yankees have with YES.

That’s what he’s worried about. The Yankees have seen their television audience drop significantly in recent years. The Yankees cannot afford for that to continue if they want to field a competitive team. Other teams find themselves in a similar position.

But again, it’s not about trimming a few minutes off a televised game. Instead, it’s about our culture today. Manfred and other sports as well are fighting the tide of a culture with an ever decreasing attention span. No one sits and watches a baseball game, or for that matter a football or basketball game, in its entirety for three hours.

And once you start tinkering, when and where do you stop?

Why bother when the highlights of a game are everywhere, even while the game is played.

And once you start tinkering, when and where do you stop? To be clear, I’m not one of those baseball purists who defy change of any kind. But baseball is baseball. It is not a sport designed for steady action. Neither, I would argue, is football or any other sport these days.

For instance, tomorrow, take a look at the number of plays that are run by both teams in the Super Bowl, versus the length of the game, which is bound to be beyond three hours. And tell me, how long should it take to play a 60-minute game?

Tinkering (like the twenty-second clock) will not accomplish anything. Manfred would need to do something dramatic to make a noticeable difference.

Steve Phillips, the former General Manager of the Mets, has a solution that would have a broad impact on the game. He wants to reduce the number of strikes to two and balls to three. He argues that it would be the same as starting every hitter off with a 1-1 count.

That would certainly speed the game up. But at what cost to the game itself? Would a Yankees game, and all the stats and records that go with it, still be a Yankees game. Would Yankees slugger, Aaron Judge, strike out more, or less? Would Yankees pitcher Michael Pineda walk more or fewer batters?

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The Commissioner needs to calm down. Where is the cry coming from to reduce the time of games, other than from his office? It’s certainly not coming from this writer, and it doesn’t appear to be coming from Yankees fans either.