Is Baseball Too Slow?

The year is 1967.

My dad is 6-years-old and he’s listening to the Boston Red Sox game on his transistor radio as he lays in bed.

Every time his favorite player, Carl Yastrzemski, is up at the plate, my dad pays closer attention. He lives and dies on his every at-bat. When “Yaz” strikes out, my dad is “devastated.”

My dad was not the only kid who paid attention to baseball back in 1967. When the Red Sox were in the World Series that year, his elementary school played the game on the PA system in the classrooms.

Since 1967, the interest in baseball among young kids has decreased dramatically.

Major League Baseball is trying to re-establish this interest in baseball among younger kids today.

“With so many other entertainment options available, people don’t want to spend the time to watch a full baseball game on TV,” my dad, now 55, said. “They don’t want to devote the time it takes for a baseball game.”

Take my 10-year-old Cousin, Alex Hoffman, for instance.

When my cousin Steven Hoffman, takes his son, Alex, to a baseball game, Steven, says that he spends “a fortune buying Alex food to help keep him from getting bored.”

One major problem is that the slow pace of play in baseball is inconsistent with the new fast-paced way of life among the youth.

Kids are constantly on their cell phones from a young age, and it seems like kids have a problem without constant activity.

“The attention span is shorter in the younger generation, and they want more action, just like they want more action in movies,” my dad said.

To combat this, Major League Baseball has implemented new rule changes to attempt to speed up the game.

“I think our players either understand or will come to understand the need to deal with the pace-of-play issues,” MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred recently told The New York Daily News.

Some of the new rules include giving managers 30 seconds to decide if they want to challenge a play, removing the pitches for an intentional walk, and giving replay officials only two minutes to determine a challenge call.

In addition to these minor rule changes, Manfred told ESPN that Major League Baseball will have to continue to create rules that “speed up the game.” 

While most people agree that these minor rule changes are a positive thing for the game of baseball, these rules alone will not capture the interest among kids whose attention span cannot allow them to watch a full game.

“I have a very low tolerance for boredom,” 22-year-old college student Jay Kasakove said. “I have to fill every moment of my day doing something, or else I get very uneasy. When I watch baseball games, I will do something in-between pitches. I won’t just sit there like an idiot, and do nothing.”

Kasakove says that he will often watch a television show while he is watching a baseball game because he “struggles” with the lack of action. However, if the game were faster, Kasakove thinks that people would be more engaged.

The problem with the pace of play, as Kasakove and others note, is that the game itself is simply slow. Some rules can be changed to improve the game, but overall, baseball is just slow.

Jack Tully, a 22-year-old college student and baseball fanatic, is one of the few college students who is not bothered by the slow pace.

“It’s one of the slower games out there, but I enjoy it,” Tully said. “I love the fact that you can just turn on the TV every night in the summer and you know that your team is going to be playing.”

“If I’m watching a playoff game, no other sport builds up the tension like baseball does,” Tully added.

My dad also said that, because he played baseball, he can “appreciate many different aspects of the game, even if they do not result in an immediate score.”

Whether it’s a good swing by a batter with two strikes or a smart pitch location by the pitcher, those things are all interesting to my dad because he knows “how skilled the players have to be to accomplish many of those tasks.”

But, although some people still have a love for the game, even they seem to agree that minor rule changes to speed up the game are a positive for the sport.

“There are some suggestions for rules that take away from the strategy of the game and make baseball a different sport,” Tully said. “But these rules that just change the logistics of the game and make an attempt to speed them up, I love them. I don’t see anything wrong with them.”