Come On, Lou – We’re Burning Daylight Here!

How pampered is our baseball punditocracy? Well, we’ve already heard them complain about having to wait thirty minutes while a team digests the news that it’s on the selling block. And we’ve heard them whine that they’ve been moved from cushy digs behind home plate to allegedly less cushy digs down the first base line.

Both these examples pale to this nugget of joy from Dave van Dyck (the guy who sent Baron Budhausen a letter protesting his new seat on the first base line):

4:19 p.m. Piniella enters the interview room again for questions, a full 11 minutes after the game. Baker usually appeared about a minute afterward.

Unbelievable, in two respects. First, it might be the only time Lou has been unfavorably compared to Dusty this year.

Second is the sense of entitlement this sentence conveys. I’m no mind-reader, so I can’t be absolutely sure how bent out of shape van Dyck and his cohort were at Lou’s tardiness.

But if it wasn’t a big deal, why bring it up? Why record it so precisely as a “full eleven minutes?” And why bring up Dusty at all? What’s he got to do with anything, other than make Lou look bad for not hustling right to the interview room?

I’m old enough to remember when you could read the morning newspaper and get a sense about what happened during the previous day’s game. Sadly, that style of reporting must no longer be part of the curriculum at the j-schools Sully claims are so important.

We used to get play-by-play coverage of what actually happened on the field. Nowadays, we get minute-by-minute accounts of how the press gaggle is made to wait. No wonder newspapers are dying.