Jim Souhan: Short and sweet gives way to long and bor-r-ring

(Editor's note: Jim Souhan's column is unavailable today, so the Star Tribune instead will use this space to print an infomercial.)

Hey, kids! Want to be a big-league hitter? For only three payments of $29.99, we'll show you how you, too, can make millions of dollars by doing nothing.

Sound too good to be true? Then you haven't been paying attention to Major League Baseball, the only major sport in the world where millionaire athletes get paid to act like defense lawyers -- they stand still, look serious and occasionally argue.

Don't believe us? Then you haven't been paying attention. Once upon a time, baseball was ruled by fast, powerful athletes, guys who liked to steal bases and hit long home runs. I know, I might as well be telling you stories about dinosaurs, but it's true! Guys like Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle could have played quarterback, wide receiver or small forward, could have anchored a sprint relay team.

They went to the plate looking to do something spectacular. Well, thanks to pitch counts, times have changed. No longer do baseball games imitate Clint Eastwood movies, two hours of suspense punctuated by action. Now, baseball games are Robert Altman films, ensemble casts standing around talking and taking forever to get to the point.

Thanks to the Yankees and Oakland A's of the late 1990s, and the new-millennium Red Sox, pitch counts rule the game. Thanks to author Michael Lewis, the act of standing still watching pitches -- and hours -- go by is now romanticized.

The baseball filibuster is now in vogue.

This might be bad for fans, who need No-Doze to get through Yankee at-bats, and the help of both Dunn Bros. to get to the end of a World Series game, but it's great for you, the aspiring young baseball player.

Thanks to pitch counts, you, too, can become a big-leaguer, even if your greatest athletic asset is patience.

Here's the deal: The Yankees of the mid- to late '90s were not the bloated underachievers who now wear pinstripes. They were gamers such as the young Derek Jeter and the older Paul O'Neill, and their method of gamesmanship was the high pitch count.

We all know that the scarcest quantity in sports is quality pitching, and the softest underbelly in sports is middle relief. With O'Neill taking balls and fouling off strikes, with the Yankees intimidating umpires into giving them the benefit of the doubt on every close pitch, games grew longer than the recession.

If you attended a Yankees game that started at 7:05, you had to be prepared for their opponent to be making its third pitching change in the sixth inning at 10 p.m.

When good pitching was at its most scarce in the '90s, teams such as the Yankees and A's capitalized, adopting hitting philosophies that often didn't emphasize hitting.

Those philosophies won titles for the Yankees and praise for the A's, whose general manager, Billy Beane, was immortalized in Lewis' book "Moneyball," in which Lewis portrayed Beane as a genius for drafting players based on on-base percentage and other vital but undervalued statistics.

The Red Sox hired statistical guru Bill James, adopted the every-at-bat-is-a-siege mentality, and won their first two World Series since 1918.

Sure, the emphasis on pitch counts has ruined baseball-watching. Now, if you want to watch the Red Sox or Yankees, you need to invest four hours. If you want to watch a postseason game, you need to stay up until 1 a.m. and take the next day off work.

But that's OK -- the emphasis on pitch counts is good for our society. It keeps people -- namely, baseball fans -- off the streets. Who has time to get into trouble when it takes 30 hours to watch a week's worth of Yankees games?

So if you kids want to become big-leaguers, buy our DVD series and learn how to take pitches and drive up pitch counts.

If you call now, we'll include a bonus DVD from Paul O'Neill on method acting -- specifically, how to act like every strike called against you is a moral outrage on the order of mass murder.

Jim Souhan can be heard Sundays from 10 a.m.-noon on AM-1500 KSTP. • jsouhan@startribune.com