This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

To say I am not an expert on the nation’s national pastime – baseball – is an understatement. 

I often don’t watch games until the end of a season, including the World Series.

Still, a column in the Wall Street Journal this morning caught my attention.  By Jason Gay, it appeared under this headline:

Oh Great, Another Cranky Column About Baseball Games Taking Too Long

The headline was referencing Gay’s column.  He has a way with words as he writes about sports for the Journal, often in a satirical style, with a dose of humor thrown in.

Here is the way he started his column:

“Finally, some good news:  Reading this lousy sports column will take 3 hours and 57 or so minutes less time than Sunday’s Game 5 of the World Series.

“That game lasted the routine nine innings. And took a whopping four hours. 

“Now granted, this column is probably about 1/200th as interesting as watching the Astros and Braves play nine. 

“Still, the point remains:

“Baseball’s gotta speed it up.”

I agree.

But, you say, you are a golfer and, so, you know about slow pace-of-play issues. 

Yes.  Golf needs to speed up, too.

In La Quinta, California, where I have the good fortune to play golf in the winter, I play at a course called The Palms.  There, whenever you play, you are given 3 hours and 30 minutes to play 18 holes.  Yes, 3-30!

It works and the play is often more fun because you proceed purposefully.  No need to run.  Just focus on playing.

In his column, Gay adds points worth considering about slow baseball, points including these exaggerations, a brand of Gay’s humor:

• Do you know the slowpoke NFL started and finished an entire Sunday night football contest — Dallas defeated Minnesota — before baseball wrapped it up?
• Did you know Fox announcers Joe Buck and John Smoltz began Game 5 clean shaven and had full speakeasy bartender beards by the end of game?  Do you know A-Rod celebrated two birthdays, and bought and sold and re-bought the T-Wolves?
• The culprit here, largely, is all the pitching changes, abetted by a significant strategic shift:  Starting pitching, as we knew it, is increasingly kaput. 
• To keep a hurler in is to make an opponent comfortable, and chance disaster.  That’s why you get Atlanta’s Ian Anderson pulled while carrying five innings of no-hit ball.
• There’s a longer, fascinating existential conversation here, about baseball’s focus on analytics and efficiency and what it’s done to the game — how pitching by committee and the defensive shifts and the all-or-nothing “launch angle” approach at the plate have conspired to make a game that is smarter and statistically defensible, but aesthetically grim.
• I’m not a hater. I say this as someone who loves a World Series.  I think it can be an incredibly dramatic and compelling television product —t he way games are produced with all the macro and micro camera angles, zipping from the players in the field to close-ups of panicked fans in the stands to managers looking tense — is magical theater.  It just shouldn’t take longer than getting a Ph.D. 

And, to Gay’s “analysis,” I would add this key point:  If you banned baseball players from spitting, often on television, just think about how much time would be saved.

I once conducted by own analysis of this “spitting problem.”  I won’t take time to share my results here, but I would just say ban it and games would be much shorter.