Joe West’s comments about the Red Sox and Yankees taking too long to play games have started filling all kinds of print and web space.  They are floating around the internet like crazy, with everyone having something to say.  Terry Francona thought it was unprofessional- and that unfair for an arbiter of the game to be making judgments like that- though to be fair to West he didn’t say only one team was guilty, just that both were when they played each other.  Mariano Rivera apparently told George King that if West is in a hurry to get somewhere he should do something else.

But the thing I hadn’t seen spelled out, until today, in this Wallace Matthews piece was the rule that a pitcher must get off a pitch in 12 seconds of reaching the mound.  That does not happen in Red Sox-Yankees games.  Joe West was simply saying that its pathetic that neither team wants to follow the rule.  Jonathan Paplebon was fined several times last year for breaking the rule.  And since there is a rule to make the pitcher throw the ball, its reasonable to stop the batter from stepping out every 7 seconds or so.

Matthews is right.  West will most likely be fined for his statements and as Matthews pointed out, if a player had said he was pathetic they would have been fined as well.  But the point has been made.  These two teams, for whatever reason, take too long to play.  They took more than 3 1/2 hours to play a game last fall, after both were already in the post-season!

Do the fans deserve to see a game in September, that they probably purchased in April played at full effort.  Yes.  You will never hear me say anything different.  But does full effort really mean taking more than 12 seconds to get off a pitch, if- as Francona pointed out- there are 411 pitches in the game, as there were in Wednesday nights match-up?  I am not convinced that you require a lot of time to be that focused, but one might tell me that’s because I never played the game.