Mailbox: Want to speed up baseball? How about 'Ball three — take your base'?
Have more comments, questions? Reach out to me at bwhite1@dispatch.com.
On baseball
To Brian: The first MLB game Babe Ruth played in took 93 minutes. The longest of the first 15 World Series games took 2:02. Length of the game is not the issue, but reflects the pace, which is. Baseball once was a game of about 60 balls put in play on 200 pitches over two hours. Now, while football has gone to the hurry up no-huddle offense, baseball has become more like 45 balls put in play on 300 pitches over three hours, and current gimmicks fix nothing. My suggestion is to have a low minor league experiment with three balls constituting a walk. Make pitchers pitch strikes and see what happens. What do you think?
Dennis Singleton, Dayton
To Dennis: Fascinating idea that would have baseball historians and stat lovers seething at how you rocked their world. The problem is that I think instead of more strikes you'll see more walks, and thus more runs and perhaps even longer innings.
To Brian: Following hard on the heels of the lockout, the latest controversy over the baseball has again shown why MLB execs are the most incompetent caretakers of any sport. There has been Major League Baseball since 1869, yet in all that time MLB has not figured out a way to make the most basic piece of equipment in the game – the ball. Too live, too dead, seams too high or too low, too tacky, not tacky enough. Virtually (sometimes literally) every season one or more new baseballs is introduced to correct the ills of the previous ball. We live in the most technologically advanced age in the history of the world and MLB can’t seem to find a way to make a proper baseball. Pathetic.
Brent Rosenthal, Westerville
To Brent: That might indeed be the problem. The more technologically advanced we get, the more we want to mess with ("advance") the technology.
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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Letters to the editor: Readers want better baseballs, faster games
