Allen showed how to speed up baseball

By Mark Rountree, Commentary

July 20, 2008 01:08 am

— If you stayed up to watch all 15 innings of Tuesday night’s (and Wednesday morning’s) All-Star Game, you might just now be recovering your sensibilities.
The 4-hour, 50-minute game ranks as the longest in All-Star Game history — by more than an hour.
Ballgames, in general, are longer these days. The average length of a major league baseball game is about 3 hours, 30 minutes. Much of that has to do with incessant television commercials, incessant pitching changes and incessant fiddling in the batter’s box.
And it’s not just the pros who are turning baseball games into marathons.
College and high school games are getting longer, as well, probably because of the metal bats being used these days.
But it wasn’t always that way.
Reader Elton Rikli reports in 1910, Drummond defeated Hennessey 1-0 in a nine-inning game that lasted just 50 minutes.
Of more recent vintage, former Enid American Legion left-handed pitcher Mark Allen won a game at the Bartlesville July 4th Tournament in 1976 in which he threw a stunningly low 38 pitches in the entire game.
Allen isn’t sure how long the game took to play, but throwing only 38 pitches in the 11-0, six-inning win over Bartlesville couldn’t have taken more than an hour, and most of that time was taken up by Enid scoring 11 runs.
“(Bartlesville) didn’t spend a lot of time batting,’’ said Allen.
Although it’s been 32 years since that early-morning game at Doenges Stadium, Allen, now 50 years old, remembers it well.
“I went 3-and-2 on the first hitter of the game, and threw only four balls after that,’’ he said.
Allen allowed just two hits, and after the second one, he induced a double-play grounder.
“After a while, I was throwing three or four pitches and the inning would be over,’’ said Allen. “We were just making plays in the field. It was textbook. It was like infield practice.’’
Allen would go 14-1 that summer, but ironically, his only loss of the season came against Bartlesville a week after his gem.
The late Bill Humphrey, whose son, Todd, was a pitcher on that Enid team, kept a scorebook of Allen’s masterpiece and gave it to Allen as a keepsake. Allen still has the scorebook of his 38-pitch, 60-minute special.
Sixty minutes. Thirty eight pitches. That was about two innings worth of baseball at the All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium.

Rountree is the sports editor of the News & Eagle.

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