Midnight Baseball

By JEFF GREENFIELD

Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack," baseball fans sing during the seventh-inning stretch. "I don't care if I never get back." As the song goes on, several thousand of them immediately demonstrate that they did not mean those words by streaming for the exits--even if the outcome is in doubt.

"They're looking up at the scoreboard clock, and it's quarter to 11, 11 o'clock, 11:15, and these people have to get home and get up and go to work the next day," says Frank Robinson. To the Hall of Famer, the exodus is more than a misadventure; it's a job.

"We're not trying to speed the game up," Robinson says of his new post as special assistant to the commissioner's office. "What we're trying to do is cut out the dead time that stops the flow of the game."

Has the game really slowed? In 1975, the Elias Sports Bureau says, the average length of the American League game was 2 hr. 25 min. Last year it ran 2 hr. 57 min. (National League games run about 10 min. shorter, probably because the American League's designated-hitter rule has removed the pitcher from the batting order; pitchers usually make for quick outs.) That half an hour is a huge increase, yet it fails to measure the agony of those games in which the earth's rotation seems to stop, in which the stillness is broken only by the faint sounds of grass growing and paint drying. In April I attended a night game between the Yanks and the Mariners in which the first five innings took 2 hr. 20 min.

Well, baseball's a team sport, so let's share the blame:

--Pitchers who appear to try to hypnotize the batter into striking out and who cannot get the ball over the plate, thus encouraging batters to wait for a walk.

--Batters who step out of the box after every pitch, adjusting their batting gloves (unknown apparel 30 years ago), as well as more intimate areas.

--Managers who apparently have confused themselves with chess masters, replacing pitchers after almost every batter in the late innings.

--Television, which pushes the 2:05-min. break between innings up to 2:25 for nationally televised games to help pay for the skyrocketing costs of TV rights.

Can anything be done? Robinson is determined to try. At a visit to Chicago's Wrigley Field, Robinson lobbied everyone from managers to the organist and public-address announcer: Get those batters moving out of the on-deck circle as soon as possible; have bat boys ready in order to bring the batter a new bat if he breaks one.

It may be working. Robinson says the average length of major league games this year has dropped 7 min. in the American League, 6 min. in the National. But will top-flight major leaguers like Yankee second baseman Chuck Knoblauch, whose at-bat rituals rival those of a Hindu mystic, really adjust to tighter limits on their behavior? Listen:

"If Abner Doubleday had wanted the game to move quickly, he would have put a clock in the game; after two hours, whoever was ahead would win." Fair enough, Chuck. Nobody wants to mess with the game's rhythm. A clock? Never. A calendar would be more like it.