Hi. I have read many pieces mentioning this, but I'd love to hear some of you folks weigh in. In the past couple of years, I haven't watched too many regular season games, for various reasons. However, I did go to my usual one or two games at Fenway-2 this year, including the Sunday night Yankees game.
I could not effing believe how slow that game moved. It started a bit after 8-by maybe 10, we were still in the bottom of the fifth, and I think they had just trotted out the 4th pitcher of the night. This was not, for us, a game worth leaving Fenway after midnight for, so we left. Game did end after midnight!
So...is this really a Red Sox/Yankees thing? A 2019 Red Sox thing? An all over MLB thing? I swear, it was excruciating-every at-bat felt like 20 pitches. I have read a piece (by someone whose name I won't mention) saying that all the joy was being sucked out of baseball-teams concentrating on strikeouts to keep balls out of play, and batters concentrating on upping the pitchers' counts to get them out of the game.
Any thoughts, or did I just pick two really bad games (the other one was in late May, and also boring as hell)? I even saw Yankees fans leaving the game with me-they (probably) went out of their way to come here, and their team was winning, and they weren't even into it.
I could not effing believe how slow that game moved. It started a bit after 8-by maybe 10, we were still in the bottom of the fifth, and I think they had just trotted out the 4th pitcher of the night. This was not, for us, a game worth leaving Fenway after midnight for, so we left. Game did end after midnight!
So...is this really a Red Sox/Yankees thing? A 2019 Red Sox thing? An all over MLB thing? I swear, it was excruciating-every at-bat felt like 20 pitches. I have read a piece (by someone whose name I won't mention) saying that all the joy was being sucked out of baseball-teams concentrating on strikeouts to keep balls out of play, and batters concentrating on upping the pitchers' counts to get them out of the game.
Any thoughts, or did I just pick two really bad games (the other one was in late May, and also boring as hell)? I even saw Yankees fans leaving the game with me-they (probably) went out of their way to come here, and their team was winning, and they weren't even into it.