My latest column for the National Sports Journalism Center at Indiana features a chat with Jim Kaat on my biggest complaint: The numbing length of baseball games.

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I say to Jim Kaat that he still could pitch a game in two hours, 15 minutes these days.

“I don’t know about that,” Kaat laughed.

Kaat is right. Make it two-and-a-half hours. After all, Kaat is 74.

Nearly 40 years ago, anything over two hours for a game Kaat started was considered a marathon. In 1974, Kaat, then 35, used a quick-pitch approach to revive his career with back-to-back 20-win seasons with the White Sox. He would get the ball and throw it in virtually the same motion.

“The umps loved me and the vendors hated me,” Kaat said.

Here’s why: On May 31, 1975, Kaat and the Sox lost a 2-0 game to Detroit that lasted an hour, 35 minutes. He routinely had games in the 1:45-1:50 range. If you blinked, you missed three innings.

So if you are looking for an expert to discuss one of baseball’s biggest problems–the maddening slow pace of play–you couldn’t find a better one than Kaat.

Make no mistake, Kaat’s passion for baseball is as high at 74 as it was at 20 when he broke in with the Washington Senators in 1959. Kaat will join Bob Costas for Game 2 of the St. Louis-Pittsburgh series Friday at 1 p.m. (ET) on MLB Network. He also is slated to work a playoff game Monday for MLB Network.

Kaat, though, thinks the game would be better if it moved quicker. He hardly is alone here. Game times have become bloated in the last 20 years. For instance, Game 3 of the 2012 World Series took three hours, 25 minutes. A slugfest, right? No, that was for a 2-0 victory for San Francisco over Detroit.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” Kaat said. “It’s not that I want to get the game over with. It’s just that 2-1 game in three hours, 15 minutes is too long. It’s not necessary.”

Television obviously is a culprit by adding more commercials. To show how much times have changed, Kaat told an amusing story of White Sox General Manager Roland Hemond asking him to take more time between innings.

“I worked so fast, a couple of times, they’d come back from commercial, and there would be one, even two outs,” said the 283-career game winner. “I didn’t have compassion for TV back then. My focus was on pitching. I said to Roland, ‘Do I have to?’ He said, ‘No.’ So I didn’t.”

Any chance of that request being turned down today? Ha. No way, not in an era where TV is king. Kaat thinks the long gaps between innings (two-and-a-half to three minutes) have an impact that carries over once play resumes.

“Players now sit in the dugout and wait because they know they’re going to get two-and-a-half minutes,” Kaat said. “It makes the whole pace, running back on to the field and then playing the game, much slower.”

TV, though, doesn’t get the entire blame here. In Game 2 of the 1965 World Series, Kaat and Minnesota took a 5-1 victory over Sandy Koufax and the Los Angeles Dodgers. The game took two hours, 13 minutes. So let’s add an additional 30 minutes for commercials in the modern telecast. That’s still a game time of two hours, 43 minutes.

Now you’ll be hard-pressed to find a post-season game under three hours. Tuesday, Pittsburgh’s 6-2 victory over Cincinnati went three hours, 14 minutes.

Kaat jokes that he blames Ken “Hawk” Harrelson for introducing the batting glove to baseball. Now every hitter has to step out of the box and adjust his glove after a pitch. He actually charted the numbing routine during a playoff game a few years ago, and it added 35 minutes to the game.

“If Mickey Mantle took a pitch, he’d keep his back foot in place and reset his front foot,” Kaat said. “He’d be ready to go. You never see that today.”

The other “little things,” as Kaat says, bog down the game: Repeated catcher’s visits to the mound; more pitching changes than back in his era; and don’t get him started on theme music for individual hitters.

“Now they all wait in the on-deck circle for their theme music to begin,” Kaat said. “It’s ridiculous.”

The concern, Kaat and others say, is that long games are turning off viewers, especially in the younger demographics. This is a fast-paced society and games that run on at three hours, 30 minutes are too languid to captivate short attention spans, young and old. I see it in my own home. My 18-year-old son, Matt, told me he is more excited about watching early-season hockey games than postseason baseball.

Frankly, I’m not sure why the networks don’t push MLB harder to improve the pace of these big games. More isn’t better here.

Obviously, MLB can put rules in place to speed up the game, but old habits die hard. Kaat contends the key now is for baseball to get players in the minor leagues. Teach them how to play faster.

“You have to go to the minor leagues with the game on TV in mind,” Kaat said. “Encourage hitters to stay in the box. Encourage pitchers to work faster. You do all those little things, and you could knock off 30-45 minutes off a game.”

What MLB really should do is show those minor leaguers old videos of Kaat working quickly and efficiently on the mound. There’s a reason why he won all those games.

Or better yet, have Kaat suit up. Even at 74, I bet he still can work faster than the kids.

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