Baseball is pretty much the only sport going on in the summer. It’s all we have from the end of the NBA Finals until college football kicks off. And what’s better than sitting outside on a beautiful summer evening and knocking back a few beers with your friends while you watch a ballgame? Who wants that to end quicker?
No one, that’s who. Plus, if I’m paying 75 bucks for a ticket, I want my money’s worth. I don’t want to be in and out of there in 2 1/2 hours. That’s how long a movie lasts and they only charge $12.50 a ticket.
What we need to do is SLOOOOOOOOOOW baseball down so we can savor it even more. Here are 10 ways to do that.
1. Fastball Ban
Fastballs get to the plate too fast. Good ones are also hard to hit, leading to outs, which make games go even faster. What baseball needs is to make the change-up the only pitch that can be thrown. That alone will add several seconds per game, and even more time will be added thanks to every game having 20–30 runs scored or more.
2. Pitch Clocks
After every pitch is thrown, 1 minute goes on the Pitch Clock. A pitcher may not throw another pitch before the clock hits 0:00 or he is thrown out of the game. This will put those bothersome “quick working” pitchers in their place and fast.
3. Timeouts for Genital Adjustment
It’s tough to keep the man meat comfortable in hot and humid summer weather while randomly running around with a protective cup squeezed in down there, too. Players should be given the basic human right of being able to move their genitals around whenever they want. Or is this still the Middle Ages?
4. Unlimited Trips to the Mound
How would you like it at your job if corporate issued an order that you could only talk to your co-workers for X amount of time and for just Y times per day. You’d hate it. So why should we forced major leaguers to wrap up their convos in short order? If the manager or pitching coach or whoever wants to stroll out to the mound and have a chat with the pitcher, he should be allowed to — and for as long as he wants. Maybe the pitcher is going through some stuff and just needs someone to talk to. We don’t know. Communication is the key to any good relationship.
5. Intermissions
A half-inning of baseball in the hot sun can get pretty tiring. Players should be given 15 minutes between half-innings to go back to the locker room, rest up and re-hydrate. Everyone talks about how tough football and hockey players are, but football players get a halftime and hockey players get TWO long breaks during games. It’s time we let baseball players rest their bodies, too. No wonder they have to resort to steroids to recuperate. That’s on us.
6. Enforced 7th Inning Stretch
Look around the stadium. Not everyone is stretching. In fact, the vast majority aren’t stretching. No, standing up and brushing peanut shells off your lap doesn’t count as a stretch, fat ass. Everyone get down on the field for 60 minutes of yoga and then we can continue the game again.
7. Weather Delays
Why are games only stopped for heavy rain? Rain is just one kind of weather. Other kinds of weather include: sunny, calm, rising barometric pressure, partly cloudy, a little breezy, among several others. Shouldn’t we stop games for those sometimes, too? You know, it couldn’t hurt if we just all took an hour or so to sit there and appreciate nice weather. Why do we have to be so negative and only dwell on rain? I guess that’s just America today.
8. Literal Replay
Replay review can take very long and that’s great. But do you know what would take even longer? Actually trying to recreate the play that just happened. That could take hours. Even days to get everything exactly the same as what originally occurred. In fact, depending on the play, it could NEVER be recreated. Imagine a single baseball game going forever. It would be like every Yankees-Red Sox game. Awesome.
