[Syd Thrift]

It's pretty hilarious sometimes how reflexively reactionary baseball fans can be. The 3 batter rule in particular was designed to *roll back* some of the stuff we've seen over the past 30 years, particularly the annoying move where teams bring in a left-handed relief pitcher, sometimes only to pitch to 1 or 2 batters before being pulled (along with the mandatory 8 pitches, the TV timeout, and the inevitable time-wasting by the manager as they work to bring in a new guy who isn't quite ready or whatever.

But no, it's different and therefore it's bad.

To me, the biggest issues with baseball now are a. the game is too static, and b. games take too damn long. There was a time when a ballgame lasted 90 minutes. In the summer, maybe you took an afternoon off, you went down to the park, you took in a game, and you still had the rest of the night to do something, just the same nowadays as if you go to see a matinee of a movie, perhaps. Over time games have slowly gotten longer and longer and now they're literally twice that long.

And for me, at least, to make matters worse, the vast majority of the game consists of watching the pitcher and batter stand around and call time-outs on each other while we wait for the game to progress. The *vast* amount of time they take now - and it didn't used to be this way either; this is a phenomenon that began in the 90s - just kills so much of the momentum that the game might have, and then even when something does happen on the field, more than half the time it doesn't even involve a fielder having to make a play on something. It's not surprising at all to me that the game is really, really beginning to skew towards older fans - they're the people who aren't bored out of their minds watching it.

We need *more* changes like these, not less. The 3 batter rule in particular was a good start, and, really, anything that will make extra inning games take less long is a bonus as well.