Slow ride

It was W.C. Fields, or so legend has it, who once said he spent a week in Philadelphia one night.

I can't say for sure, but I bet he was at a baseball game.

Comes now October baseball, the most wonderful time of year as long as you lay in the kind of provisions Lewis and Clark did when they set off to explore the western half of America. Of course, Lewis and Clark were only gone two years.  October baseball might require some extra stores of jerky and pemmican.

Yes, if you haven't guessed it already, this is the Blob's annual old-man-shouting-at-the-clouds rant at the state of baseball -- once a fast-paced National Pastime and now, especially in the playoffs, an excruciating slog resembling the Indianapolis 500 if the Indianapolis 500 were contested by snails.

In the NL wild-card playoff last night, Colorado and Arizona played a hell of a baseball game, apparently, as long as you weren't a pitcher. The teams combined for 30 hits and 19 runs in 8 1/2 innings as the home-standing Diamondbacks won, 11-8. And it didn't even take four hours to play!

No, sir. It only took 3 hours and 54 minutes.

To play a game that, because the home D-Backs were leading, didn't even go the designated nine innings.

I didn't watch it, on account of I am not genetically disposed to spend almost four hours watching anything, let alone a game where so little is happening so much of the time. My attention span, alas, never got out of A-ball. And so I would have nodded off, or changed channels, long before that exciting moment when Paul Goldschmidt or Charlie Blackmon called time to adjust their batting gloves for the 16th time, or that other exciting moment when Diamondbacks catcher Jeff Mathis trotted out to the mound for the 12th time to discuss china patterns with whoever was pitching.

But I shouldn't pick on the poor Rockies and Diamondbacks. The Yankees and Twins played a wowser the other night in the AL wild-card game, too. And that one didn't last four hours, either.

It only lasted 3 hours, 51 minutes before the Yankees won 8-4 in another slugfest.

Look. I get it. Baseball is the only game that doesn't have a time clock, and that lends it a certain charming timelessness, a boundless romp across Elysian fields that's over when it's over. And baseball has marked the time, and America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers, and blah-blah-blah, yadda-yadda-yadda.

People will come, Ray. People most definitely will come.

But they'd better pack a lunch if they do.

The aggravating thing about all this, of course, is baseball has rules in place to speed up the pace of play, but it won't enforce them. A player calling time to step out of the box and adjust his batting gloves or admire the grain of his bat does so at the discretion of the plate umpire. If ump says no, you have to stay in the box and play on.

But when is the last time you actually saw an umpire say no?

You see the problem. And because it's not a problem anyone seems to want to solve, I will predict right now who the MVP of the playoffs will be.

My DVR.