The essence of immediacy, otherwise known as the need for speed, has infiltrated the game I love.

Baseball is a slow-moving sport, similar to the Western wave of migration in the United States starting in the late 19th century after the War of Northern Aggression created a new breed of American, one dealing with the loss of not just 2 percent of the population but of the innocence of ignorance.

Because if you didn’t know it was wrong to enslave someone or that charging across a wide-open field into rifle fire was insane, then you were baptized in blood and left to pick up the pieces.

I think about the men that moved and marched miles away from anything they had ever known, only to arrive someplace else and attempt to kill complete strangers that, for the most part, looked and sounded just like them.

Both the Union and Confederate armies were plagued by deserters, who somewhat wisely recognized that it would be easier to disappear and change a name than get killed fighting another man’s war.

I don’t have that option as I walk back from behind the plate towards the mound. I can’t leave. I can’t desert my team and there’s no one coming to help me.

I know I’ve romanticized and glorified what is essentially a grown man being paid handsomely to play a child’s game, but this is my life.

And long innings like this are as annoying to the players on the field as it is to those in the stands and the millions watching from home.