Inside the desperate effort to rescue America's pastime from irrelevance

Where in the name of human rain delays is Juan Soto? The stud outfielder is late.

Everyone keeps checking their phones the antsy Major League Baseball officials, the San Diego Padres PR guy, the handful of reporters, and the assorted hangers-on you encounter around baseball clubhouses.

Everyone is wondering when the Padres superstar will show up. He was supposed to be here half an hour ago, just after this baseball players' sanctum opened and we were allowed to join them in their most elemental of baseball activities: waiting around.

Soto, who is 24, works at his own pace. He is a baseball player. Players do their thing and the game indulges their routines, at least to a point. But everything was supposed to be different today, the first day of baseball's new, accelerated life. I had flown into Phoenix the night before to witness the first spring-training game of the year, in Peoria, Arizona, between the Padres and the Seattle Mariners. Normally, I would pay zero attention to this contest. Even if it counted in the standings or, for that matter, even if it was a World Series game I wouldn't care. Baseball has been losing me for years, as steadily as its games have become more interminable every season: less scoring, less action, slower, more stagnant.

Yet here I am here we all are-for a Padres-Mariners scrimmage on February 24, one of two games scheduled to begin just after 1 p.m. (The Rangers would be concurrently opening against the Royals not far away, in Surprise, Arizona.) These would be curious and newfangled specimens, the first major-league contests to feature rules enacted to revitalize a sport that had been heading toward cultural irrelevancy. "Time of game: three hours, 32 minutes or some such bloated number-had become a mocking coda to the nightly slogs.