Dr. Gregory K. Hillis, an associate professor of theology known around Bellarmine University's campus as a pretty passionate baseball fan, has a proposal for Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred: "Don’t run from baseball’s leisurely pace. Embrace it. Teach about it. Market it."
In a
column for Commonweal Magazine, Hillis makes the case that baseball's "pace of play" issue - which the league has attempted to fix with pitching clocks and other rule changes designed to make the sport attractive to younger fans - isn't really a problem at all.
Drawing on the work of 20th-century German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper, Hillis believes baseball "has something to contribute to a society of people who (maybe without even knowing it) both need and want the cyclical rhythms and pastoral pace of a game that doesn’t entertain so much as provide opportunities for training the contemplative gaze."
Read
his column here.