Yet another one for the broken stopwatch file. And this time, Clay Buchholz wasn’t pitching.
Last night’s Boston-Tampa Bay game went 3 hours, 49 minutes. And this was for a 3-1 Red Sox victory.
Yes, that was an improvement over Monday’s 4:19 affair. Many people blamed the slow moving Buchholz for that one.
Well, who was at fault for Tuesday night’s drip-by-drip game? I tried to make it to the end, but with the game moving so slow, it proved to be a wonderful sleep aid. I didn’t see the final score until this morning.
In the other game Tuesday, Detroit’s 8-6 victory over Oakland went 3:25, which now seems swift compared to Boston-Tampa Bay.
As I said, I’ll continue to monitor the game times during the postseason. Assuming I can stay awake.
It was a tense, interesting game. If you fell asleep, you missed out. As for who was to blame, the length of the game last night had a lot to do with Joe Madden making 9 pitching changes. In an elimination game, I don’t know how you limit a manager from doing what he thinks he needs to do to maximize his teams chances to win. The other factor in play here is that the Red Sox whole approach is to see a lot of ptiches. They aren’t going to play fast games on any scale. If you speed games up, teams like the Sox are still going to be comparatively slow. Again, I don’t know how you legislate that out of the game.
Good point about pitching changes. However, it isn’t just the Red Sox. Others low-scoring games are going long too.
True that’s it’s a MLB-wide problem. That being said, as a Red Sox fan, it seems like the Sox (particularly Sox-Yankees games, where you have two teams that approach the game in the same way) are lightning rods for this criticism.
All the pitching changes to be sure, but remember these are the Red Sox who along with the Yankees love doing things like stepping out of the box, adjusting their batting gloves (thanks Hawk!) and other stuff designed to upset the pitcher.
Blame this one on the umpires (again) and the TV networks who insists on 2 1/2 minutes or so for commercials every break-chance they can get.
Was Lawrence of Arabia too long, Mr. Sherman?
No, but you’re talking about a classic film. Was last night’s game a classic?
You better believe it was too long. There’s a rule in place regarding time between pitches that’s not worth the ink used to write it. sitting in person during the between-innings-commercial-palooza is just painful. This ain’t cricket, hurry the game up a little.
Welcome to the AL East, Ed. … Sounds like a bedtime problem, not a playoff-baseball problem.
Personally, those 3-hours-or-less Cubs games have been putting me to sleep for years. More reliable than warm milk.