“They’re two of the best teams in baseball. Why are they playing the slowest? It’s pathetic and embarrassing.”

– Umpire Joe West, as told to the Bergen Record.

West’s comments are meant to defend his colleague, the widely reviled Angel Hernandez, for not granting time to several Yankees and Red Sox during Tuesday’s game in Boston.

I watched, and it did look weird to see Hernandez denying Derek Jeter time. How dare he! Then again, it looked pretty weird to see so many Yankees and Sox calling time so frequently, but I wasn’t sure if I was just noticing it more than I normally would because Hernandez wasn’t granting it, so I was paying attention.

Either way, West’s probably right. I’m not sure if the Yankees or Sox step out of the box or more frequently than any other teams, but if he and his crew are under the gun to speed up games, then by all means, deny Jeter his precious batting-glove adjustment time.

It’ll ameliorate all the sportswriters who are so bent out of shape about the length of the games, at the very least.

It does, however, fly right in the face of something Cowboy Joe West himself says on his spoken word album about baseball, Diamond Dreams:

It’s the only sport where you can manage right along with the manager. In no other sport can you do that.
You can’t do it in basketball, because you don’t know what play they called.
And in football, as soon as the ball is snapped, everybody’s running into each other.
But in baseball, it’s all pretty, and it’s all out there for you to see it.
And this game’s not run with a clock; it can last forever.

More importantly, umpire Joe West has a spoken word album. I’m obviously buying that.

UPDATE: I really thought I’d be the first to bring to the blogosphere, or at least refresh to the blogosphere, news of Joe West’s musical exploits. But then, upon finishing this post, I went to my Google Reader and noted that Big League Stew beat me to the punch. Check that site out for more on this West thing.

Not long ago The Rivalry was about Manny and Papi. Jeter and Mo. It was about bloody socks, Pedro tossing Zimmer and everyone hating A-Rod on both sides of the field.

Now the symbol of Yankees-Red Sox is Nick Johnson looking at pitches….

He fit the style the Yankees want to play, the style that now defines the Chinese Water Torture aspect of The Rivalry.

Johnson’s walk gave the Yanks the lead, Cano homered in the ninth, and Alfredo Aceves, Joba Chamberlain and Mariano Rivera delivered strong relief. So there is a rubber match tonight in this season-opening series. The over-under already has been established at 300 pitches, bring some Red Bull.

The Rivalry is now Nick Johnson. Walk don’t run.

– Joel Sherman, N.Y. Post.

OK, first of all — and maybe this is something personal, something about the way I enjoy baseball — I find walks plenty exciting. Maybe not exciting in the way I find a Jason Statham movie exciting, but there’s something thrilling about a marathon at-bat ending in a walk, like the one David Wright drew after nine pitches from Josh Johnson on Monday.

Also, command of the strike zone is a big part of what made all the great players Sherman cites in the Rivalry so awesome — especially Pedro and Rivera.

Moreover — and this is the important part — taking pitches makes you a better hitter. Johnson’s ability to not swing at balls should be lauded, because it forces pitchers to throw him strikes, meaning he will either see pitches to hit or get on base via walk. That’s like the whole point.

That’s basically why they made the rule about walking in the first place, back whenever baseball was invented. Otherwise there’d be no impetus for pitchers to ever throw anything worth swinging at, and games would be way, way more boring than the ones Sherman laments.

I play in a pickup baseball game in Brooklyn on weekends. Many of the players involved — myself included — suck hilariously, but because the level is so low, it provides insight into the derivation of some of baseball’s fundamental logic, and how perfectly woven the rules of baseball really are.

Because, in this game, everyone prefers putting the ball in play to taking a base on balls, early on — before I started playing — the game’s organizers decided that batters should have the option to not take a walk if they earned one, instead resetting the count so they would have the opportunity to swing the bat more.

Unbeknown to me, walks became stigmatized, and so when I started jogging down to first base upon looking at a 3-1 pitch well off the plate in my first plate appearance, the catcher followed me and gently told me that no one really ever takes bases in the game — everyone opts to reset the count, especially the first time through.

That remained the norm for a while. But in time, guys who had no business being on the mound started pitching more frequently, since there was no penalty for wildness. At-bats and innings became interminable, and playing the field downright boring. Eventually, the leader dudes decided we had to eliminate the resetting rule and force people to walk again.

After a few Ollie Perez-style walk-fests, the wildest “pitchers” quit trying.

Now, only pitchers who can get the ball over the plate pitch, and so every player gets what the guys were hoping to achieve with the optional-walk rule in the first place: a whole lot more good opportunities to swing the bat and put the ball in play. Walks fundamentally make baseball more exciting.

Obviously Nick Johnson is playing baseball on a whole different level than I am, but Red Sox pitchers — like everyone else — know by now that he won’t swing at a pitch that’s not over the plate. He forces them into a decision: They can nibble around the corners and risk handing Johnson a free pass, or put pitches over and hope Johnson doesn’t beat them swinging.

Johnson might not always make the most of his opportunities when he does swing the bat. He doesn’t have the power of Manny or Ortiz or the speed of Jeter. But Johnson, thanks to his discerning eye, secures better opportunities for himself to drive the ball and, by getting on base so much, for his team to score runs.

That’s exciting, I think.

You might have heard that Randy Johnson retired last night, giving me as good a reason as any to link up this guy. This might be the craziest thing that’s ever happened:

That moment has honestly been the subject of as many late-night debates amongst me and my friends as any in history.

One of my buddies is absolutely convinced it should serve as proof of the existence of some higher power because, as he points out:

A) How many times have you ever seen a bird fly between a pitcher and a batter during a pitch before, and so what could be the chances that the one time it does, the bird (briefly) occupies the exact same space as a baseball moving 100 miles per hour?

And B) What are the chances that if, should any pitcher hit a bird with his fastball, it’s going to be Randy Johnson, the guy with the reputation for throwing about as hard as anybody in baseball who just so happens to LOOK EXACTLY LIKE A SCARECROW, a device created to discourage birds from entering an area?

It’s as if Randy Johnson wanted to up his scarecrowing game to a whole new level and wanted to make an example of that one bird to make sure that no other bird ever dares come anywhere near a pitcher’s mound again. Because that one bird, ahh… it didn’t work out so well for that one bird.

Anyway, I’m not trying to hate on Johnson with the scarecrow stuff because I really did love watching the guy pitch, which is odd as I usually prefer smaller, puppetmaster type pitchers like Pedro, Santana and Maddux.

But how Johnson looked was a big part of what made him such a sight to behold, plus I always got the feeling it fueled his fastballs at least a little bit.

I’ve got no evidence, of course, but looking at that pockmarked face and that awkward body, I couldn’t help but assume every one of those heaters came with a little bit of extra mustard from so many lonely middle-school lunches.

And so I read stories like Jeff Pearlman’s, asserting that Johnson was a jerk who deserves to be treated as such, and I actually just feel bad for the guy. And I read anecdotes like this totally unconfirmed one in the Amazin’ Avenue comments section and I really hope they’re true, and that Johnson’s just some misunderstood metalhead with a heart of gold who’d help you out when you’re sick and is interested in photography, because that’d all jive a lot better with the sad former seventh-grader Randy Johnson I’ve created in my head. Although I guess that guy could grow up to bully reporters, too.

Anyway, his baseball legacy is as follows: one of the greatest pitchers of his generation, one of the greatest lefthanders ever, that really tall dude, anecdotal evidence that tall pitchers mature late, the guy who’ll be labeled “the last 300 game winner” until the next “last 300 game winner,” World Series hero to Diamondbacks fans, postseason goat to Yankees fans, and, of course, that guy who totally destroyed that bird that time.