Why are the most important games in baseball also the most tedious?

Isn’t the idea to attract new fans to the playoffs?

And what do fans like?

My belief is that fans like crisp games, modest running times, contests that end before 11 p.m. … and minimum images of players spitting or fans mugging for the cameras.

If so, baseball is failing to deliver its best product on all counts. Aside from providing some exciting finishes for fans who have survived hours of ennui, mid-inning pitching changes, meetings at the mound, hundreds of pitches — and fought off the Sand Man.

Let’s look at the numbers, so far, through the division series — including the Twins-Tigers one-game playoff.

Score, time of game, pitchers used:

Twins 6, Tigers 5 (12 innings), 4:47, 13

Dodgers 5, Cards 3, 3:54, 13

Dodgers 3, Cards 2, 3:07, 7

Dodgers 5, Cards 1, 3:05, 8

Angels 5, Red Sox 0, 3:09, 6

Angels 4, Red Sox 1,  3:11,  7

Angels 7, Red Sox 6, 3:49, 10

Phillies 5, Rockies 1, 2:48, 6

Rockies 5, Phillies 4, 3:41, 13

Phillies 6, Rockies 5, 4:06, 13

Phillies 5, Rockies 4, 3:31, 9

Yankees 7, Twins 2, 3:38, 9

Yankees 4, Twins 3 (11 innings), 4:22, 14

Yankees 4, Twins 1, 3:25, 10

Averages, 14 games: 

Winner 5.1, Loser 2.3 (9.2 innings),  3 hours, 36 minutes, 9.9 pitchers

That’s too much. Of everything.

How many casual fans can baseball attract to three-and-a-half-hour games that involve 10 pitchers?

How many viewers last to the end of games that end at 12:15 a.m., which is when Game 3 of the Colorado-Philadelphia series ended — MDT. That was 2:15 a.m. in Philadelphia.

This is awful.  And I don’t care if ratings on TBS were up. I am convinced they would be even higher if baseball took action to see to it that games finish before midnight, East Coast, and in less than three hours. Regular-season baseball is slow, but they managed to get them done in 2:51, on average, this season — 45 minutes faster than the playoffs are lasting, so far.

Some suggestions:

1. Start no postseason game later than 7 p.m. in the East (4 p.m. Pacific).

2. Schedule all weekend games in the daylight.

3. Enforce rules on the length of time pitchers have between pitches; in theory, they are supposed to pitch the ball within 12 seconds of a batter entering the box. This seems to be ignored in the postseason.

4.  Limit the number of pitchers on postseason rosters to 10.  This will certainly cut back on those time-consuming mid-inning pitching changes.

5. Ban visits to the mound by anyone who isn’t a manager or coach. Catchers jogging out to the mound add minutes to every game.

6. Reduce the length of time between the end of one half inning and the beginning of the next. It’s supposed to be 2:25; it certainly seems longer.

7.Dump the “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch. Baseball went decades without this extra song, but now we need it for every single game? There’s 3-4 minutes right there.

I am a baseball fan. I am inclined to watch playoffs games. But they are painfully slow. They require monstrous investments of time. Those first 14 games lasted more than 50 hours. That’s too much.

And I fear it only can get worse, as the stakes get higher, and everyone in uniform seems to decide that nothing can happen at the same speed it does in the regular season. This has turned into a fan’s marathon. Except that a middling marathoner can run 26.2 miles in far less than 3 hours and 36 minutes.