Is Baseball (Pause) . . . Becoming Too (Yawn) . . . Slow? : With Nine-Inning Games Lasting Nearly Three Hours, Ways Are Being Sought to Move Sport Into the Fast Lane

The stopwatches are out as big Lee Smith trudges from the Angels’ bullpen on a weight-of-the-world walk to the mound at Anaheim Stadium. This particular amble is timed at 71 seconds, a sprint compared to many of his entrances.

Smith’s languid strolls in games most often in their third hour provide an appropriate metaphor for the pace of baseball in the final decade of the 20th Century.

Always proud of its timeless nature, baseball, the sport without a clock, is being measured against the clock as it tries to rebuild its image after an acrimonious eight-month strike.

Polls indicate that football, basketball and even hockey have sped past the national pastime in popularity, as if its familiar rhythms and pace have suddenly made it an anachronism.

In an era of longer games, the pace and those familiar rhythms have been disrupted by many influences, including TV breaks of two minutes and more, batters continually stepping out of the box, and expansion-era pitchers treating each delivery as if the fate of the world rested on it. Pitchers seldom have complete games, prompting the manager to visit the mound and call the bullpen frequently.

“We’re just trying to be economically sensitive to the fans and give them more baseball for their money,” Andy Van Slyke, the Baltimore Orioles’ center fielder, said facetiously the other night, the Orioles having just beaten the Angels in 3 hours 12 minutes.

The average time for a nine-inning game through last Sunday was 2:57. It was 3:02 in the American League with its designated hitter and 2:52 in the National.

That overall average is up four minutes from last year--when eight American League teams averaged more than three hours a game and the Dodgers led the National at 2:55. It is up 24 minutes from the 2:33 average of 1981 and up 32 minutes from the 1975 American League average of 2:25, the first year that the Elias News Bureau, baseball’s official statistics house, computed averages.

Acting Commissioner Bud Selig said the length of games is a serious concern and that it is being addressed.

Former American League umpire Steve Palermo, whose mobility was impaired when he was shot while intervening in a 1991 robbery near a Dallas restaurant, was hired last year to investigate ways of shortening games. He made a preliminary report last June that was tabled because of the labor problems. He will make a formal presentation to the owners’ executive council Tuesday.

“This isn’t rocket science,” Palermo said. “These are realistic, doable things. With a concerted effort by players, managers and umpires, we can knock 30 minutes off every game.

“That’s 3 1/2 hours more per week they can spend with their families, and many more shorter, snappier games.”

Palermo said he wouldn’t discuss his recommendations until the owners see them, but they include:

--Elimination of the designated hitter.

--Raising the mound from 10 inches to 12 or 13, the pre-1969 level, to give the pitcher an edge.

--Encouraging umpires to call the high strike as defined in the rule book and assure them they will be supported by the league offices if they do so.

--Enforcing a rule that says the batter can’t leave the box.

--Allowing pitchers to put their fingers to their mouths while on the mound, rather than having to make frequent trips off the dirt, provided they wipe immediately.

--Instructing clubs that the public address announcer is to introduce the first batter of the next inning exactly 1 minute 35 seconds after the previous inning has ended so that the batter is in the box and the next inning can start at the prescribed two minutes, rather than the 2 1/2 or three minutes as frequently happens because of TV commercial overruns or a laxity by umpires and players in getting the new inning started.

--Encouraging managers to call for new pitchers as soon as they leave the dugout and restricting those TV breaks to the prescribed two minutes or less.

Palermo said he realizes there is little chance the owners will do anything to inhibit offense, meaning it is unlikely the DH will be eliminated or the mound raised. He also realizes that tampering with TV time is touchy because it produces revenue, but he suggested that he is only looking to restrict the breaks to the already prescribed two minutes and to having play set to resume at the end of that time.

Van Slyke said: “Any time a game is being televised--and when isn’t a game being televised?--it’s almost impossible to start an inning when it should be started. There’s no urgency to it. TV definitely sets a tone of ho-hum. I mean, TV may pay some of the bills, but you seldom see spring training games, even with all of the player changes, go longer than three hours, because they’re not on TV.”

A reporter applied a stopwatch to several recent telecasts and found that ESPN’s national games and Channel 5’s telecasts of Dodger games generally adhered to a two-minute break between innings and pitching changes, but WGN telecasts of Chicago White Sox and Cub games often produced breaks of 2:45 or longer. If 30 seconds is eliminated between half-innings, that’s eight minutes.

The third base umpire carries a stopwatch and is expected to keep the game moving, but it doesn’t happen.

A National League executive warned: “We sell our souls to advertisers during the playoffs and World Series, and it’s my understanding that the commercial time on the game-of-the-week telecasts [on the Baseball Network] after the All-Star break could be three minutes or more.”

Selig said: “I don’t see a problem with the two-minute requirement, but it’s got to be adhered to, and the evidence indicates it isn’t. TV is clearly part of a complicated equation. We began to make progress [toward shortening games] a couple years ago, but there’s definitely been slippage.

“It’s a solvable problem, but we have to use common sense. The question is, are rule changes needed or can we do it with the current guidelines? The objective is to cut 20 to 30 minutes off.”

It can be done. Non-televised games in the developmental Arizona Fall League averaged 2 hours 26 minutes; televised games averaged 2:46. The league tried to keep batters in the box, had managers make pitching changes as soon as they left the dugout and restricted breaks between half-innings to 90 seconds, with announcement of the next hitter after 75 seconds.

Steve Cobb, the league’s vice president, said he is “confident the measures we’ve taken could be applied at the major league level to improve the flow.”

Similarly, Amherst baseball Coach Bill Thurston, chairman of the NCAA’s Division I rules committee, said most conferences have reported an improvement of 12 to 15 minutes a game during the two years that (1) batters have been required to remain in the box after pitches on which they don’t swing and (2) pitchers have been permitted to stay on the mound when going to their mouths.

The new rules, Thurston said, have changed the attitudes of pitchers and hitters.

“We were concerned that the pitchers might play a cat-and-mouse game, knowing that the hitters can’t leave the box, but it’s encouraged the pitchers to work faster because they know the hitter is ready,” he said.

“The pros have to do something, and I think it’s worth a try. They’re killing fan interest the way it is.”

Van Slyke isn’t so sure.

“I look at a baseball game as an evolving masterpiece,” he said. “Some times it isn’t pretty, and sometimes it is. Whether it takes two, three or four hours to complete, so be it. I mean, no one complains if an Oscar-winning movie runs three hours, but even one hour of Freddie Krueger is too much.”

Besides, Van Slyke said, even if you keep pitchers on the mound and hitters in the box--”aren’t we supposed to check out the blondes in Section 30?”--how do you compensate for the time-consuming ramifications of expansion-diluted pitching?

The American League’s earned-run average through 215 games this season was a bruising 4.86. AL pitchers were averaging a combined 8.14 walks a game, and the starters had completed only 21 games.

The National League’s ERA through 220 games was 4.32. NL pitchers were averaging a combined 7.23 walks a game, and the starters had completed only 15 games.

And of course, the response to a new pitcher is often a pinch-hitter, who needs warm-up swings in the on-deck circle.

No manager has been linked to longer games as much as Oakland’s Tony La Russa. Some reporters have referred to “creeping La Russaism,” but La Russa said he has no idea what that means.

“If it means I change pitchers when I feel it’s necessary, then I’m guilty, but there’s nothing I do that I invented,” he said, adding that no one is more cognizant of how essential a good pace is to the rhythm of the pitcher, the defense and winning in general.

“We’re all responsible--the pitcher, the hitter, the manager and the umpire,” he said. “We can all make a difference if we go about our jobs aggressively. There’s plenty of areas that can be refined, but you can’t tell anyone not to play to win.”

Nor, said National League umpire Brian Gorman, can an umpire be asked to call strikes that aren’t strikes.

“People talk about the high strike of the rule book, but how do you relate a stationary figure in the rule book to the real thing in the batter’s box?” he asked.

“If we start calling strikes that aren’t strikes, the dugouts are going to burn.”

Perhaps, but Gorman acknowledged that something needs to be done. He said the interruptions are so intrusive that it’s difficult to maintain focus.

“It’s a major concern,” he said. “Everyone is talking about it.”

If they are, maybe they shouldn’t be.

“I think people are making a bigger deal of [the time] than it is,” Andy MacPhail, president of the Chicago Cubs, said. “If it’s a good game, people will watch it. If it’s a bad game, it doesn’t matter if it’s 2:30 or 3:30. Why we harp on it and draw attention to it is beyond me. We have other priorities that need to be addressed.”

Said Van Slyke, packing his bag near midnight at Anaheim Stadium: “What I don’t understand is why people in California would be concerned. They show up in the third inning and are gone by the seventh or eighth.”