On Sept. 28, 1919, the New York Giants beat the Philadelphia Phillies 6-1 in a nine-inning game that lasted 51 minutes. Granted, the game came on the last day of the season—the first half of a double-header that must have been like torture for the players. At the end of the day, the Phillies would sit a distant 47.5 games behind the pennant-winning Cincinnati Reds, while the Giants would end up 9 games back.  Clearly, the players in Philadelphia that day were in a hurry to shut things down and get back home for some off-season hunting, fishing and drinking beer out of a pail. But still . . . 51 minutes.

In recent years, there have been renditions of the pre-game National Anthem that have lasted 51 minutes. There have been relief pitchers who have taken 51 minutes to wander in from the bullpen. Robinson Cano takes that long to exit the batter’s box after hitting a home run (or even what he thinks might be a home run).

Which is to say the game has slowed down considerably since 1919.  A typical American League game has grown from around an hour-and-a-half in the 1920s, to 1 hour and 58 minutes in 1943, to a stultifying 2 hours and 52 minutes in 2011. (with the Yankees at 3:08 per game, Red Sox at 3:04 and Dodgers at 3:02 taking top honors.) And that’s just the regular season. As we all know, it’s now, in October, when baseball truly wobbles off into deep space, sending fans both at home and at the ballpark into a post-season zombie state with gaping mouths, vacant eyes, twitching hands and feet, and, in many cases, a hunger for . . . football.

In the 2009 World Series between the Yankees and the Phillies, the games ran 3:27, 3:25, 3:25, 3:25, 3:26 and 3:52. The games in last year’s Series between the Cardinals and the Rangers ran well above three hours on average as well. Yesterday, the first two games of the 2012 post-season both checked in at over three hours, and I found myself awake at midnight, nodding off occasionally as I made sure the Orioles put the Rangers safely to bed for the winter. As a comparison, the 1957 World Series between the Yankees and Milwaukee Braves (a year I pulled at random) featured games, all daytime affairs, that ran 2:10, 2:26, 3:18, 2:31, 2:00, 2:09 and 2:34.

Baseball claims to be aware of the problem of excessively long games. Commissioner Selig periodically calls for measures to shorten the game. He does this in the same way that American presidents periodically call for measures to reduce the national debt. Analysis shows that the initiation of MLB’s new “speed-up” rules in 2008 dropped regular-season game times from 2:51 all the way down to 2:49. Selig vowed to impose the same rules as the 2010 season began, yet the first two games of the year between the Red Sox and Yankees lasted nearly 4 hours each and even brought a rebuke from umpire Joe West, who called the delay tactics employed by both teams “pathetic and embarrassing and a disgrace to baseball.” West, in turn, was criticized by Yankee Mariano Rivera and Boston’s Dustin Pedroia for daring to speak up, and reportedly admonished by MLB higher-ups. (It should be noted that no fans appear to have been consulted on the matter.) Anyway, even if Selig puts in serious measures to move things along, no one knows what might happen if teams fail to comply. My guess is that noncompliance would result in a long delay in the middle of the game as managers and umpires discussed just who was delaying the game, and how, and possibly even why.

You do have to wonder about a sport that, in an age when everything is delivered more quickly and efficiently, allows its product to drag on like a chess match in which the moves are sent back and forth by registered letter. It’s as if NASCAR suddenly decided to introduce the Daytona 5000. Or Uncle Ben’s came out with a new product: Hour Rice. You’re headed down the wrong road, baseball, and at this rate you’ll never find your way home again.

There are many subsets in the world of movies.  Best Performance by a Chimpanzee is one (the immortal Cheetah, in “Tarzan and His Mate,” is the clear winner there). Worst Performance by Someone Trying to Throw a Baseball is another. The 10 Lamest Depictions of Jesus. Five Most Disruptive Examples of Speeding Up the Film. You get the idea.

One subset I got to thinking about the other day (a rainy one) is which actors had the good fortune to appear in the best movies. I mean, if you take the best five movies an actor ever performed in, how do those five stack up against everyone else’s top five? I did a little research and came up with the following ranking of my own top group – with a surprising winner (whose acting I don’t even really like very much). Maybe you can think of someone whose top five should be on the list, too. Maybe you can suggest two to fill out my Top 10. Remember, it’s not necessarily a recognition of superior acting, it’s all about the quality of the movies they were in. (And I will have to do actresses next.)

1. Joseph Cotten: Citizen Kane, Gaslight, Shadow of a Doubt, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Third Man.

2. Jimmy Stewart: It’s a Wonderful Life, Vertigo, The Philadelphia Story, The Shop Around the Corner, Anatomy of a Murder.

3. Cary Grant: Notorious, His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, North by Northwest, Bringing Up Baby.

4. Robert Duvall: The Godfather (I and II), Apocalypse Now, MASH, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lonesome Dove (TV).

5. Dustin Hoffman: The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Tootsie, All the President’s Men, Kramer Vs. Kramer.

6. Henry Fonda: Grapes of Wrath, The Lady Eve, My Darling Clementine, 12 Angry Men, Fort Apache.

7. Jack Nicholson: Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Shining, Reds, 5 Easy Pieces.

8. Claude Rains: The Invisible Man, Now, Voyager, Casablanca, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Notorious.

When we make consumer choices based on packaging, it’s usually a subconscious or barely conscious decision. For instance, when I choose Coke over Pepsi, it has nothing to do with the taste of the product (I preferred Pepsi in a blind taste test I took years ago) but rather the Coke can’s red color and logo have for so long subliminally symbolized “refreshment” to me that my eye and hand automatically seek it out. Similarly, when you choose Tide over All, or Aunt Jemima over Mrs. Butterworth, or Nestle’s Crunch over Hershey’s Crackle, or when you grab L’Eggs or Kleenex cubes, is it a matter of real superiority, or has the packaging somehow won you over?

Some products have packaging that more directly calls out to us. When Life Savers were introduced 100 years ago, their neat rolls of hole-in-the-middle candies were an instant fit for everyone’s pocket or handbag.

Similarly, Pringles were all about packaging, and distancing themselves from messy, greasy bags of chips that could break into pieces and quickly get stale.

And I have a hard time not buying The Farmer’s Cow milk. The cow on the carton recruits milk purchasers just as surely as Uncle Sam once recruited young men and women for service in the armed forces.

(And let’s not forget those special products that are ONLY about packaging. Would anyone buy PEZ candies if they didn’t come in their own dispensers?)

All of which brings me to the latest packaging marvel to enter my life: Talenti gelato. After a fair amount of testing (Tahitian Vanilla Bean, Belgian Milk Chocolate, Black Cherry Amarena, etc.), I can say that Talenti is a superior product, one I would buy for that reason alone despite its stiff price. But Talenti comes in sturdy plastic screw-top containers! 

What a shapely, elegant little package! For me, it was love at first screw. The revolutionary lid maintains freshness in a way cardboard tops can’t. When you’re done (it won’t take long) you can recycle or reuse. (I’m sure “Hints from Heloise” could come up with dozens, if not hundreds, of uses for the empty container.) I’ve always felt that you must take beauty where you find it. For me, most recently, it was in the freezer aisle at my local Stop & Shop.

As the madness in London is about to begin, the thing I want to know is why the tug-of-war is no longer an Olympic sport. That’s right – eight men or women at the end of a sturdy piece of rope, pulling with all their might for king and country.

The tug-of-war actually was an Olympic sport beginning in 1900 and ending in 1920. No one seems to know why it was discontinued. It is inconceivable to me that golf and ice dancing and that gymnastics thing with the hoops and ribbons are all Olympic sports while the elemental battle of the tug-of-war can find no love at all.

Can you imagine if we’d had the tug-of-war all along, in every Olympics year? England vs. Germany in 1936? U.S.A. vs. U.S.S.R. in 1960? (Would you care to cast in your head a Dirty Dozen-type movie about that one?) Israel vs. Egypt in 1968? The TV ratings would be off the charts. And can you imagine what the East German women’s tug-of-war team would have looked like? Epic.

Today’s match-up wouldn’t be bad either. North Korea vs. South Korea would be a highly entertaining spectacle, as would Australia vs. New Zealand or, I don’t know, ANY MATCH AT ALL!!

I suppose it’s too much to hope for a return in my lifetime, but you know what? I’m pulling for it.

My father was born in 1911 and was a high school and college swimmer from 1925 to 1933 (Dartmouth record holder in the 150-yard backstroke, as he liked to point out), so it is natural that he was well versed in all the competitions—even the odd and obscure ones—having to do with his sport. Of these, one of his favorites was the Plunge. I fondly remember him demonstrating it to my brother Michael and me when we were boys, and then encouraging us to try it.

Note the form, would-be plungers!!

The Plunge was a simple event. You dove from the side of the pool and then tried to see how far you could float, without moving arms or legs, in 60 seconds. As I recall, the first part of the event was fun but the last 20 or so seconds were incredibly uneventful as, with your forward propulsion depleted, you basically floated in place until time was up (or you ran out of breath).

It wasn’t until years later that I discovered the Plunge had been a very popular event in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and indeed had been an Olympic event in the London Games of 1904. It cannot have been much of a spectator sport. Because competitors tended to drift sideways as well as forward (and perhaps even backward), they dove into the pool one by one rather than as a group. According to accounts of the day, the fatter you were, the better the chance you had of winning. It’s hard to imagine the Plunge in the age of the Speedo.

In any case, it’s one of the those rare Olympic events that you can picture yourself doing fairly well in. For reference, William Dickey of the New York Athletic Club was the gold medal winner in London (there were only five competitors), floating 62 feet six inches in the allotted time. It’s an Olympic record that stands to this day because the event was never a part of subsequent Olympiads. The world record of 80 feet was set in 1912 by University of Pennsylvania plunger S.B. Willis.

The NCAA dropped the Plunge as a college event in 1925, but maybe it’s time to bring it back. There’s a peaceful manatee-like quality to the Plunge, and none of the thrashing through the water that’s associated with other swimming events. In fact, it’s one of the few sports that allows you to compete and bask at the same time. You might give it a try yourself the next time you’re at the pool.

Candy? Trilobite fossil? Only tasting will tell.

After seven straight days of rain the weather finally cleared today and I went out into the woods. The ground was very damp, a good time to look under logs. I love to roll the logs over in late spring and watch the bugs skitter for cover. Today, though, when I rolled one log I noticed that several particularly ugly and disgusting little beetles didn’t move. I looked at them more closely and soon realized that what I had before me were either long-dead trilobites or English hard candies. In the spirit of science, I picked one up, bit through the brittle shell, chewed into the spurting soft center and swallowed, The taste? The taste was not merely stale, but millions of years old, the taste of time passing, of ennui itself, yet not without a wicked hint of mothballs. Question: What were English hard candies doing under a log in the woods near my house?

I was always an early riser as a boy, even on Saturday mornings—or maybe especially on Saturday mornings. The house was quiet as I rushed downstairs to the den, where our television was located. In those days, we could only get one channel clearly, Channel 8 from New Haven (originally Channel 6). I don’t think Hartford’s Channel 3 was on the air yet, and even after it did join the modest lineup, our reception of it was iffy. As for New York channels, we could only pick them up, briefly and unreliably, during atmospheric oddities, such as increased sunspot activity or the transit of Venus.

In any event, I’d get downstairs and turn on the set, and this is usually what I got to see:

It’s called a test pattern. In the days when TV channels did not run programming for 24 hours, they put up the pattern during the period (usually in the middle of the night) when they were off the air. So, depending on how early I was awake, I’d watch the test pattern for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, even a half-hour. The image was accompanied by a high-pitched tone that I still associate with boredom, impatience and anxiety. And then abruptly at 6 a.m., the test pattern would disappear, replaced by an image of a waving American flag and the playing of The National Anthem, which would signal the beginning of the broadcasting day. Real viewing would next commence with 15 minutes of union propaganda called “Industry on Parade,” an episode of “The American Farmer” or the early, early show I remember most fondly, a cartoon called “Crusader Rabbit.”

The thing is, as much as I happily recall Crusader, Rags the Tiger and their doings down in Gallahad Glen, it’s the test pattern that has stayed with me most clearly—and that I appreciate today for its unique blend of art and implied technology. Take a look at the test patterns collected here and tell me they aren’t beautiful, mysterious and high-tech all at the same time. If I had Jasper Johns’ talent, I’d bag the American flags and paint test patterns instead.

Tried the “she loves me, she loves me not” experiment with a number of different wildflowers today and was shocked to learn that she loves me not. Can this be true? And just who is this mystery woman?

It’s astonishing to me that every year just when it gets hot enough outside so that you need nice shady spots, the trees grow leaves and provide nice shady spots. This is nature at its best.

Today really does feel like the first day of summer here in Connecticut (as it’s supposed to on Memorial Day Sunday), a time when my mind drifts to the shore and to the view seen in the photo at the top of this page. It was taken from the roof of a cottage called The Decoy in Quonnochontaug, R.I., for many years the summer retreat of my wife’s family, the Grahams. As our three children were growing up, it was the ideal place for us to go every summer for at least a week, and maybe more if we could get it. As soon as our car hit the gravel drive, the kids were free to bike to the beach, play tennis, play baseball, go crabbing or try to trap rabbits down in the yard seen here. I was free to play in the surf, read for blissfully uninterrupted hours at a time and take outdoor showers in the sunshine. We went every summer for more than 20 years, and part of it will always be inside of me. Our family will be heading once again to Quonnie, but not to The Decoy, in late July, so we’ve got that going for us. The photo, by the way, was taken in early September a couple of years ago; the brown colors around the freshwater pond and the bare branches on the pear tree, at left, reflect the effects of an enormous salt spray sent up from the ocean beyond during a hurricane a month or so earlier.