Two things that nobody in America reads today: the online legalities before you check the little “I Agree” box, and Major League Baseball’s regulations for pace of play.

I watched a baseball game this weekend. It took a long time. So long that I can’t help but wonder why the MLB even has a set of “Pace of Play Procedures.” And that’s not to say that baseball games don’t have a pace. They do. It’s like waiting for my sister’s eyebrows to grow back after she tried to wax them by herself.

Judging by what I witnessed Sunday, when I made the horrible decision to sit down and watch an entire live televised MLB game, there is no way umpires know the pacing procedures.

My beloved Cubbies played the Atlanta Braves in a three-hour-and-43-minute, can-somebody-please-shove-two-chopsticks-in-my-eyes snore-fest. It was like watching Scary Movie V: it might have been decent if somebody had cut 90 minutes out of it. I’d rather have watched my sister’s eyebrows grow back.

There were 280 pitches thrown and after 170 of them, the batter stepped out of the box and did absolutely nothing.

The majority of the time was spent by batters kicking imaginary dirt off their cleats while they un-Velcro and re-Velcro their batting gloves, even when they didn’t swing.

The Braves’ Justin Upton, who on Sunday became “The Man Who Ruined My Movie Plans,” does this ritual of stopping before the batters’ box and un-fastening and re-fastening his gloves even before taking his first swing.

As if Upton’s pre-bat routine wasn’t enough of a warning of how the game would go, here’s the sequence of his at-bat: Strike, steps out and looks down his bat as if making sure it was still straight. Ball, steps out and talks to barrel of the bat. Ball, steps out, takes a practice swing, taps corner of the plate, steps one foot in, taps plate, places other foot in, wiggles hips, looks at the pitcher, calls timeout, and then proceeds to ground out to first.

The average number of seconds between each pitch was 29 seconds. My cat can solve an entire Rubik’s cube in 29 seconds.

Six times the Cubs’ catcher called time out to go out to the mound to discuss, what? Our intervention in Syria?

These parts of the game ultimately just repel the fans. The unnecessary extra time just makes you want to flip the channel to C-SPAN. The game finished, finally, but not before the passing of three hours and 43 minutes, 170 step-outs and a whole pot of coffee.

scschroc@mavs.coloradomesa.edu