I must confess: I am not usually one to complain about pace of play, about long games, even games that can stretch deep into a night. There is a large part of me that will forever be the kid who got two live baseball games a year — one at Shea, one at Yankee Stadium — and used to root for extra innings.

I got a 17-inning game once on Picture Day at Shea, July 9, 1977, Mets vs. Expos, both teams scoring a run apiece in the 11th before the Mets finally won 7-5 on a two-run Lenny Randle walk-off in the bottom of the 17th off Will McEnaney. I can’t speak for the other 10,407 who were there that day, but in my memory it was a deafening scene when ol’ Lenny crossed the plate. And I was a little wistful; I was hoping for 20.

That game took 4 hours and 17 minutes to play or, put another way, two minutes longer than Game 1 of this ALDS between the Yankees and Twins on Friday night. Of course, Friday’s 10-4 Yankees win was somehow contained to nine innings (actually, technically, 8 ½), and let’s just say that even the die-hards who stayed to the end seemed especially less than enthused about being there than 10-year-old me was 42 years ago.

I am not alone, of course. The Yankees win might have been No. 1 on people’s minds Saturday in the hours before Game 2, and so was DJ LeMahieu and Aaron Boone’s curious bullpen choices and the fact that the Twins’ postseason losing streak got a little more endless.

But pace was right there. Because it ought to be mathematically impossible for nine innings of baseball to take 4 hours and 15 minutes to play.

I got an interesting email from a faithful reader named Mike Moschitto who opened with this: “After yelling at the kids to get off my lawn, I made a very un-scientific comparison of last night’s Yankee game vs. Game 1 of the 1976 ALCS, Yankees vs. Royals.”

And what followed was awfully telling.

“Friday night:
66 at-bats
15 hits
14 walks
25 strikeouts
5 homers
13 pitchers used
362 pitches thrown (!)
36 balls put in play

1976:
68 at-bats
17 hits
1 walk
9 strikeouts
0 homers (but 2 triples)
3 pitchers used
? Pitches thrown
59 balls put in play”

(Pitch counts weren’t a regular part of box scores in 1976, but Catfish Hunter went nine innings and Larry Gura went 8 ¹/₃. We can assume the number was a lot less)

Not surprisingly, that game in 1976 took 2 hours and 9 minutes to play. That’s 2:09! That’s almost exactly half as long (and since the Yankees beat the Royals that day at Kaufman Stadium, 4-1, it means there were actually three more outs (and four more hitters) required for a full game, so we can say it with authority:

It took half as long to play that game.

Half!

Mike’s point was a simple one: “Which game would you rather have watched?”

And the answer is a simple one, even for those of us who love baseball, who watch old baseball games in January, who watch entire spring training games in March, who spend at least a portion of every game from early April to late October watching a couple of innings of baseball. It is a great sport. It is a great thing.

It is one of the best things.

But you really can have too much of a good thing. You can have too much ice cream. You can have too much steak. Movies that run for 3 hours could probably run an hour less. The fade-outs of both “Hey Jude” and “Layla” probably could’ve been a minute shorter.

And baseball games can still be awesome at less than 4 hours and 15 minutes.

At half as much less, in fact.