Samantha Power: belief

Transcript context

…For me. So many games are over 3 hours. Shouldn’t the game be 2 hours, 17 minutes? Look, if the pitchers could live with shorter warmups between innings, if what’s left of the advertising industry could live with fewer ads delivered in that manner, I could live with slightly shorter games. But so far, the kinds of adjustments that have been contemplated, that are being, indeed, put in place this year, like holding your hand up and saying, “Here are your four balls for your . . . Here’s your intentional walk. I’m not going to go and do the four pitches.” I personally think that’s a loss, and maybe it just shows you what a purist I am, but I find the suspense and the fact that even if 1 out of 20 — or I don’t even know what the numbers are, probably more obscure than that — but just the 1 out of 50 balls that go awry on an intentional walk, that’s part of the drama. So much of what happens in baseball is about what has happened before that informs your experience of what is happening before your eyes, so to buy yourself four minutes here, seven minutes there . . . Susan Jacoby actually had a wonderful little book on this called Why Baseball Matters. But the bigger issue is, we do have an aging constituency for the game, a youth potential constituency that can’t stay off its phones and that believes in instant gratification for just about everything, and so the one-click consumer wants drama, wants action. The slow buildup, the idea that how many pitches the pitcher has thrown by the fifth inning then is going to have bearing on which crappy middle reliever the Washington Nationals are going to bring in — those sort of joys that people who’ve been groomed on the game and who didn’t receive the game in the first instance as kids in this world of distraction — we do have to grapple with the fact that we’re not winning those new converts. Now, I think a lot more could be done by bringing baseball to the inner city and to communities that haven’t had the space or the resources to make it happen because the truth is, the greatest conversion for people, or the greatest attraction to the game, comes from people who’ve played the game and have had to work those mechanics and those philosophies and those strategies themselves. So maybe less focus on length because, frankly, if a one-nothing nine-inning game is boring for somebody, a one-nothing six-inning game is going to be boring for somebody. Should Pete Rose be allowed into the Hall of Fame?…

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