I don't care what the official explanation is for the 20-minute delay in the bottom of the sixth inning of Tuesday's Twins-Dodgers game, and neither does anyone who watched the unbearable, interminable mess.
All that matters is that it was triggered by a double-switch (!) and it slowed down an already glacially paced game. If it was the night baseball died — and it very well could be — the only saving grace we can take from the experience is that it produced some very good tweets.
Narrator: It did not.
That's a 2003 NFL Draft callback from Brauer, which is the kind of obscure humor we crave at midnight on Twitter.
No ice cream for Dave Roberts, either.
EVEN THE TWINS WERE CONFUSED.
Don't tempt me, Jimmy.
No! That was the worst part. We still had three innings to go.
And that's the real story here. Between Dodgers starter Kenta Maeda taking approximately 17 minutes between every pitch in the third inning — Manfred: get and enforce a pitch clock, like, yesterday — and a double-switch delay that even a golf fan would think was long and pointless, this was an extreme but relevant example of baseball's biggest problem. The game moves too slowly and takes to long in a world where everything else is trending toward efficiency.
