Los Angeles Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani is tagged out by Toronto Blue Jays shortstop Isiah Kiner-Falefa after an attempted steal during the ninth inning in Game 3 of the World Series, Monday, in Los Angeles.Brynn Anderson/The Associated Press
We’re all living on baseball time now. Since the Blue Jays made it to the World Series, the whole country has entered that Salvador Dalí painting of melting clocks. Minutes and hours don’t govern our schedules any more: We tick along to a more esoteric rhythm.
Still physically recovering from the nearly seven-hour saga of Game 3? That’s baseball time.
Wondering whether you have the stamina to sit on the couch and watch again for a third straight night? Baseball time.
Asking yourself how something could be at once so slow and so stressful? You guessed it.
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Baseball and time famously have a unique relationship. A game’s length is parcelled out in innings, which end not when a certain number of seconds have elapsed, but when one team has secured enough outs. Already, we’re through the looking glass of ordinary measurement. It is like some fable where the hero has to answer three riddles before being allowed to sleep.
In theory, games and even innings can last infinitely. If not for Freddie Freeman’s somewhat merciful swing in the 18th inning on Monday, we might have learned the hard way.
For the uninitiated, baseball time can feel like jet lag. Your body responds unhappily to long stretches of physical inertia coupled with the dramatic speeding and slowing of heart rate that comes with the sport’s unusual pace. With long stretches of calm interspersed with dramatic bursts of action, time seems to accordion in and out during a baseball game, tightening to a short sharp wheeze of anxiety before unfurling in a moody exhale of relief. Your aorta does the same.
Jays pitcher Jeff Hoffman reacts to a third out during the 10th inning in Game 3 the World Series, Monday, in Los Angeles.Ashley Landis/The Associated Press
In fact, Game 3 notwithstanding, games have shortened in the past couple of seasons since a series of rule changes introduced by Major League Baseball lopped about half an hour off the usual duration. The pitch clock is the most notable reform. Pitchers now have 15 seconds to throw with no runners on base, 18 with men aboard and 30 between batters.
This was a radical departure. Previously, baseball had been the rare sport where clocks had no purchase. Predictably, some purists grumbled.
And yet, baseball’s field of gravity is so strong that it changed clocks more than clocks changed it. For the clocks you find on a baseball diamond are strange, forever being reset, hundreds of times a game, rather than counting down predictably for 20 minute periods or 12-minute quarters.
Meanwhile, virtually every fan has adapted and now prefers the slightly sped-up version of the sport – even if their internal clocks still tell them to anticipate watching a game for three hours, rather than the now typical two-and-half.
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The peace we have made with such a deep intervention in the game’s own logic is all the more remarkable given baseball’s powerful relationship with historic time. The past is cherished and evoked constantly in the majors, far more than in most sports. The relative antiquity of the leagues, the density of comparable statistics and the natural romanticism of an old pastoral game all conspire to bear baseball ceaselessly back in time.
You felt it when Trey Yesavage tied Sandy Koufax’s record for most strikeouts in the first five innings of a World Series game, while the 89-year-old Koufax watched on from the first row. This was a man who pitched to Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays – names as fabled and slightly fictional-sounding as Jay Gatsby or Paul Bunyan – suddenly in competition with a 22-year-old rookie on live TV.
You feel baseball time doing its accordion thing, for that matter, every time Shohei Ohtani is compared with Babe Ruth. No one calls Connor McDavid the next Howie Morenz.
The slowness of the game helps allow the past to seep in: A century and more of history can sit comfortably in the interstices between pitches and innings. We need things to talk about amid bites of a hot dog and sips of beer. We need stories to tell, and analogies to draw, to enliven the monotony.
Right now we are in the passionate throes of the playoffs, but the regular season is usually as dramatic as a farmer’s almanac. For some of us it is among baseball’s pleasures that there is a game nearly every day – an almost eccentric 162 of them, filling the calendar from spring to fall like phases of the moon.
It is comforting to know that, just as sure as the sun will rise in the east, there will be more baseball tomorrow. In that way, the sport syncs up better with solar time than with the artifice of the clock. Massive, ancient, reliable and mysterious, baseball moves like some celestial body. You can set your watch to it. Even if it scoffs at the time your watch keeps.