The Yankees have never needed to manufacture excitement. And when Mariano Rivera was pitching, it could have taken ten minutes for him to get from the bullpen to the mound and no one would have cared. With the first chords of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and the bullpen doors opening like a matador entering the arena, Rivera struck the soul of the game in a way that no one can duplicate or manufacture. You want drama, you want excitement in baseball, it’s here in the three minutes of what they call “down time”.
And yet, Major League Baseball seems obsessed with doing just that.