Nearly two months into baseball’s pitch-clock era, you sometimes wonder how the sport ever got so slow. Why did we endure standstill traffic on a ride that could have been much smoother?
“It was Red Sox/Yankees — a lot of people in these parts, they certainly know about that,” Scott Servais, the manager of the Seattle Mariners, said with a smile last week before a game at Fenway Park in Boston. “I mean, it was four hours every night. Just a regular 4-2 game was 3 hours and 40 minutes. It’s sped up things a lot.”
The game Servais’s team played that night would not evoke the prose of Angell or Updike.