For the better part of October, I pounded on baseball. Hard.

It’s not that I don’t love the game. I do. I just hate the way it is being played now.

Really, it would seem to be an easy fix for baseball: Enforce rules that require batters to stay in the box and demand that pitchers work faster. Simply pick up the pace.

If they played quickly in big games in Babe Ruth’s era, Mickey Mantle’s era, Reggie Jackson’s era, why can’t it be that way in Miguel Cabrera’s era?

I thought I would leave some parting shots from others to show I am hardly alone in this crusade.

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Michael Glicken of Sports Media Monitor was intrigued by my rants about the length of games. Far more proficient in math than me, he took an analytical approach in evaluating the pace of play.

Glicken writes:

Our goal was not to explain every inefficiency that drives games longer (why game six in 1918 only took an hour and 46 minutes for example), it was to determine whether the present postseason games ran longer than “normal,” and get closer to the root causes.

Glicken offers a detailed analysis. Definitely an interesting read.

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Matthew Futterman of the Wall Street Journal did a piece on why kids aren’t watching baseball. I’ve made that observation from my own teenage boys, who only had a passing interest in the World Series. They were much more into college and pro football and the beginning of the NBA season.

Writes Futterman:

The average World Series viewer this year is 54.4 years old, according to Nielsen, the media research firm. The trend line is heading north: The average age was 49.9 in 2009. Kids age 6 to 17 represented just 4.3% of the average audience for the American and National League Championship Series this year, compared with 7.4% a decade ago.

Comparisons with the NFL are pointless. That behemoth of North American sports dominates nearly every demographic. But kids make up a larger segment of the television audiences for the NBA, NHL and even soccer’s English Premier League than they do for baseball.

Kids accounted for 9.4% of the NBA conference finals audience this year, compared with 10.6% a decade ago. They represented 9% of the NHL conference-finals audience in the spring. For Premier League soccer on the NBC Sports Network, kids are accounting for 11% of the audience.

Futterman then writes:

As riveting as the sport can be at its most intense moments, baseball’s primary activities are the pitcher staring at the catcher to decide what to throw and the batter stepping in and out of the batter’s box. It doesn’t have to be that way.

May we suggest two simple rule changes: Once batters step into the box, they shouldn’t be allowed to step out. Otherwise it’s a strike. If no one is on base, pitchers get seven seconds to throw the next pitch. Otherwise it’s a ball.

Wow, what a novel concept.

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Michael Bradley of the National Sports Journalism Center also harped on the time issue.

Baseball can, however, do something about two things that hurt it. First, the sport has become long and, frankly, boring. No matter how much Fox tries to play up the drama that accompanies every pitch of a Series game, there can be no denying the horribly tedious pace of just about every baseball game played. Come October, the tortoise becomes a slug. Game three of the 2013 Series, a 5-4 nine-inning affair, lasted 3:54. That’s absolutely uncalled for. It’s one thing to let a three-hour game wash over you on a balmy summer evening and quite another to endure hours of standing around when the alarm clock is ready to pounce at 6 a.m.

Bradley, though, adds baseball needs to do a better job of marketing its stars.

The magic of baseball doesn’t fire fans’ interests any longer. There has to be more. The NBA doesn’t sell the pick-and-roll or the three-point shot. It sells the people who make those things come to life. And it does that throughout the whole season and then during its draft and free agency. By the time the Finals come around, fans can’t wait to see these heroes on the biggest stage. And just about every team capable of reaching the Finals has stars with whom fans are quite familiar. Baseball does a terrible job with this. As the 2013 playoffs dawned, few fans outside of Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Oakland knew about those team’s top players, and that was 30% of the field. If baseball wants its World Series to be more popular, it must create a culture of stars, the better to rope in casual viewers.

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Joe Lucia of Awful Announcing also picks up on the marketing theme.

That’s why baseball is struggling among kids. It’s not the pace of the game, the length of the game, or the late start times – it’s all about marketing. Joey Votto is one of the best players in baseball, but when was the last time you saw him in a commercial? Chris Sale is the best player in the city of Chicago, one of the largest media markets in the country – but could a non-White Sox fan even pick him out of a lineup? If Andrew McCutchen shaved his head, could he walk into any convenience store in Pittsburgh and buy a candy bar?

Agree, Joe, but it also is pace of the game too. Combination of both.

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Anyway, I wanted to get in a few last shots. I’ll give it a rest for a while, but you can be sure I’ll be firing away again next October.

My latest column for the National Sports Journalism Center at Indiana University focuses on the World Series ratings. Even a compelling series featuring two of baseball’s marquee teams is far behind the ratings for their last meeting in 2004, a Boston sweep over St. Louis. And the decline isn’t just limited to that year.

Follow the trend.

From the column.

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Usually the way-back machine is brought out whenever there’s a discussion on World Series ratings.

Last week, Keith Olbermann turned the clock back to 1971. In a commentary, he noted 37 million households out of a possible 61 million tuned in to watch Pittsburgh beat Baltimore in Game 7 of the 1971 World Series. That translates to roughly 50 million viewers.

World Series ratings since 2004 (Baseball Almanac)

Of course, the World Series never will see those kind of ratings again. Olbermann noted that if Fox can average an estimated 25.3 million viewers per game (17 million households tuned in) like it did in 2004 for the Boston-St. Louis Series, “Rupert Murdoch will kiss me on the mouth.”

Sorry if I ruined your day with that visual.

Actually, 2004, not 1971, is the better benchmark to assess the erosion in World Series ratings. Back in the early ’70s, there only were three networks. Viewers had fewer choices. It was World Series or “Love American Style.” So naturally, baseball’s ratings would be higher.

OK, if that’s the argument, why has there been such a decline in the ratings since 2004?

Last year, San Francisco’ sweep of Detroit averaged 12.7 million viewers per game, the lowest ever for a World Series. That’s nearly half of Boston’s sweep in 2004.

Through four games this year, a World Series featuring two of baseball’s most storied and appealing franchises has averaged an 8.4 rating at 14 million viewers per game. The overall number should trend higher with a definite Game 6 and a possible Game 7 on the agenda.

However, barring a major upset, it won’t come close to 2004′s numbers.

Unlike the heyday of the 70s, MLB and Fox can’t roll out the argument that the TV landscape was different nine years ago. It wasn’t, since the cable smorgasbord had been in place for years. In other words, the 2004 World Series still registered despite healthy competition from HBO, CNN, ESPN, etc.

In fact, the World Series was considered to be such a ratings powerhouse in 2004, the NFL didn’t even schedule a Sunday night game against it back then.

OK, you say that Red Sox team captivated the country after rallying from a 3-0 deficit to beat the Yankees en route to winning its first World Series title in 86 years? Well, the following year, the White Sox, my team but hardly America’s team, pulled in an average of 17.16 million viewers per night for its sweep of Houston.

Murdoch might not kiss Olbermann if the 2013 series averaged 17.16 million viewers, but he probably would shake his hand.

Since then, only one World Series, the Yankees’ six-game victory over Philadelphia in 2009 (19.4 million viewers), has exceeded 2005. The 2011 World Series, which saw St. Louis win in seven games, averaged 16 million viewers per game. You would expect a higher number since it went the distance.

Consider this: Prior to 2004, the previous nine World Series dating back to 1995 averaged a 15.16 rating (22 million viewers per game). While the presence of the Yankees in six of those World Series definitely helped pull in viewers, it shows ratings in the 15-18 range were considered more of the standard back then in what also was a cable era.

So what caused the erosion in the ratings? There’s enough material to write a book.

In short, a couple of factors come into play. This year marks only the third time in the last 10 World Series it will reach a sixth game. There have been four sweeps and three five-game series. The lone seven-game series was in 2011.

The Series has failed to build on the drama from one year to another, and there’s been a residual effect in a decline in interest.

“We had Boston in 2007 and they won in four straight (over Colorado),” said Fox’s Joe Buck before this year’s World Series. “The ratings went down. You don’t have to be a genius to figure it out.”

There are other reasons, to be sure. However, to me, the mind-numbing pace of games continues to be a big factor in the tune-out. Viewers just don’t have the patience to stay with 5-4 games that last three hours, 54 minutes, as was the case for Game 3. There are so many long pauses and breaks it gives viewers ample reason to reach for the remotes to check out HBO, CNN, AMC, ESPN, etc. You could watch an entire episode of “Homeland” and maybe only miss two innings, if that.

There’s also the issue of the late starting times. Thanks to the endless games, they usually end around midnight on the East coast, past a lot of people’s bedtimes.

Everyone has their theories. However, one thing is clear: You don’t have to go back to the 70s to proclaim that the World Series ain’t what it used to be. It is a recent trend too.