It took years, but we’ve discovered what baseball’s postseason TV networks have been up to.

In conjunction with the CIA, FCC and the Federal Bureaucracy Bureau, they’ve been conducting a sociological experiment to learn how far Americans will go before they snap, before they can no longer suffer what they once enjoyed.

All this time, we’ve been lab rats. I knew it! Had to be. It’s not as if ESPN actually felt that Joe Morgan shouldn’t stop talking.

In Fox’s case, it has been charged with trying to alienate the affections of baseball fans by presenting the opposite of what the audience would logically expect to see and hear.

For example, when Game 3 of the NLCS ended with Jim Edmonds making a nice but unspectacular running catch, viewers – baseball fans – could reasonably expect to see the Cards, now up two games to one, in spontaneous celebration as they left the field.

Instead, Fox presented three – three – consecutive replays of Edmonds’ catch. This was also a tipoff, an example of a covert experiment revealing itself as too lacking in subtlety to remain covert. This is where cunning became lost to cruelty.

The same cruel intentions are at work late in close postseason games, a time when right-headed viewers would choose to stay fully focused on the game. That’s when Fox shows shot after shot (after shot after shot) of people in the ballpark watching what you’d like to be watching – the game.

In fact, for years Fox has scoured the stands in search of anyone who for any reason has his or her hands clasped in front of them, as if in anxious prayer. Such “prayer shots” – even if the subject is merely combating the onset of frostbite – are given immediate on-air priority.

While such a production plan every October inspires nationwide angst among viewers, Fox’s reply is that viewers are just plain wrong – watching people watching the game is what viewers prefer to see during climactic moments. Fox has explained that such shots serve to underscore the building “tension” within games.

This explanation also is a clear sign of a cruel experiment at work because none of those shown in these crowd shots is looking around to check for tension on the faces of the people around them. No, they’re all watching the game.

And logical fans would rather study the tension on the faces of the pitcher and the batter, thus the tension Fox and its clandestine confederates are clearly looking to accentuate is the hypertension inflicted upon the TV audience.

The torture continues with Fox’s insistence that we ignore what we see and believe what we’re told. In Game 5, it began in the top of the first!

After Albert Pujols singled, Fox cut to a “Pitch By Pitch” insert. Tim McCarver said that we’d see John Maine throw Pujols five straight fastballs.

As those “fastballs” were replayed, McCarver counted them, “One, two, three . . . ” But the second pitch wasn’t close to being a fastball, and the radar graphic in the “Pitch By Pitch” series showed it to have clocked 78 mph. The third, clocked at 87, looked like a breaking pitch. The fifth, a fastball for sure, was clocked at 95. Maine’s fastball had a fluctuation margin of at least 17 mph?

But, because we’re supposed to believe what we’re told and ignore what we see, McCarver never wavered – yep, five straight fastballs.

It’s all too much? Can’t take it anymore?

Exactly!

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Dolan-ized: Joe Micheletti, the exIsles’ TV analyst who has replaced John Davidson on Rangers’ MSG telecasts, already has demonstrated his adherence to Jimmy Dolan’s regard for local fans as not bright enough to distinguish good from bad.

Wednesday, with the Rangers in the process of losing, 3-0, at home to the Predators, Micheletti, after a Jaromir Jagr shot, said, “I like what’s happening here. Jagr hasn’t shot much in the first six games, but he’s getting more shots here.” At the time, the Rangers were on a five-on-three. Jagr shot from alone in the slot. Had he not shot, he’d have created suspicion of game-fixing.

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Checkout Counter: YES, tomorrow at noon, has 5-0 Harvard at 5-0 Princeton, John Sterling and Howard Cross in the booth. . . . Ranger Jed Ortmeyer, ex-Univ. of Michigan forward who’s out following a pulmonary embolism, will at 7:30 be a CSTV analyst before tonight’s Miami of Ohio-Michigan hockey telecast.