For those who pine for the good old days -- and you know who you are -- think back to a seventh game of a World Series involving the Yankees, with a rather bloated score of 10-9, that was completed in a brisk 2 hours, 36 minutes. Yes, that would be 1960, the game ended by Bill Mazeroski.

Or recall the wondrous seventh game of the 1971 Series, with Steve Blass throwing a complete game against the Baltimore Orioles, in -- get this -- 2:10. There's no doubt about it, it takes that long to make it halfway through one of today's ponderous affairs.

In a 1962 pennant playoff game between the San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Dodgers, the nine-inning contest consumed 4:18. Until Game 2 of the American League Championship between the Yankees and Red Sox this year, it stood as the longest nine-inning playoff game on record. Game 3 beat it by two minutes, and like cricket, took parts of two calendar days to complete.

One of baseball's enduring charms is that it is the game without a clock. You can't take a knee and allow the ticks to continue in football. You can't slow things down such as basketball and hockey. It is a game of outs, not time, and its languid pace stands in stark contrast to the go-go instant gratification of the attention-deficit-disorder current day. But when the boss sees employees reporting for work bleary-eyed and sluggish from having watched this year's playoffs -- actually, it is the boss suffering from the symptoms of lack of sleep -- it's time to examine the record.

A century ago, a professional baseball game took roughly 90 minutes to complete. This year, the average length of a National League game was 2:47:20, 25 seconds longer than the average AL tilt, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. Tony La Russa's penchant for four-pitcher innings -- he actually used that many with a five-run lead against the Pirates earlier this year -- sets the standard for overmanaging, not to mention the visits to the mound, pitchers stepping off, batters stepping out to adjust their batting gloves and the commercial breaks between half innings that contribute to such meanderings.

The real crawl in time happened betwen World War II and 1960. The average length of an AL game in 1943 was 1:58. By 1960 it was 2:38, according to the Society of American Baseball Research. That's 40 minutes in 17 years. And it increased only by 10 minutes in the next 30 years (2:48 in 1990) despite the more frequent pitcher changes, the introduction of the designated hitter in 1973 and more commercials to feed a broadcast.

But why the increase in the 40s? The dilution of the talent pool of players gone off to war and night baseball. Lights were put around ballparks to give laborers who drove the war effort a chance to watch the games. And when baseball defeated the darkness, and games could conceivably go on into the wee hours, the envelope expanded and kept expanding as America moved to the suburbs.

There is an old joke that baseball is 20 minutes of action crammed into three hours. As if to prove the point, Major League Baseball offers a package that shows only those pitches that result in a hit, a run or an out. Time of game in Condensed Baseball? Twenty minutes. With no commercial breaks.

The postseason is another matter, of course. The outcomes are so important and the games seem plodding and halting. Consider the 5:47, 14-inning marathon in Game 5 of the ALCS.

Games routinely approach or go beyond the stroke of midnight because of starting times. TV doesn't want baseball intruding on its programming, but TV pays baseball's bills and TV dictates when the first pitch is thrown. Need proof? The historic Game 7 of the ALCS was pushed back 10 minutes to allow the NLCS game to conclude.

Starting a game at around 8:30 p.m. allows for maximum ratings across the country. (The most recent time a day game was played in a World Series was Oct. 24, 1987, and it was played indoors in Minnesota, lasting 3:04. But that's another issue.)

East Coast viewers have a hard time staying awake to watch night games. But TV doesn't care. The games draw viewers and ratings allow for the games to be shown for free. Unless fans begin turning off their TVs, you'll have to deal with it.

Consider this phenomenon if the Cardinals force Game 7. The seventh game is scheduled for Sunday, and if the glacial crawl held sway, it might have ended past midnight. That means a season that began in March would end in November.