The Red Sox apparently didn’t get the memo in time, which caused a lot of consternation when all J.D. Drew wanted to do was slather some “Manny Mota Grip Stick” on a new piece of wood.

The Mota stick itself wasn’t the problem the other night in Oakland. Not since George Brett went berserk 25 years ago have many umpires begrudged a player the right to make his bat handle as sticky as he wants.

Drew’s crime was that he was wasting time, though it was hitting coach Dave Magadan who served the sentence when he was tossed for arguing the new enforcement of rules for speeding up a game that almost every player will tell you doesn’t need speeding up at all.

There’s a lot of fans who might differ.

They’re the ones who take the family out to the ol’ ball game and have to plead with their bored kids to stay until the end. They’re the ones who get bored themselves sitting around between innings waiting for the interminable commercials to be played.

Just how bad has it gotten? On Sunday in San Diego, it took the Padres and Cincinnati Reds 5 hours, 57 minutes to play a game — and that’s with the umpires watching, making sure no one was dawdling.

OK, so that game did take 18 innings to play. But on the same day only two nine inning games in the National League were played in less than three hours.

Give commissioner Bud Selig some credit for recognizing that games are lasting far too long and asking both umpires and teams in a series of recent conference calls to pick up the pace, mostly by enforcing and abiding by rules that are already in place but have long been ignored by both umpires and players.

I say give him some credit, because he called for the same thing 13 years ago, about the same time owners decided to make umpires return to the traditional strike zone. Since then, efforts to speed up play have been enforced about as often as umpires have called letter-high strikes.

There’s not a lot of reason to be optimistic that it will be different this time around. The game keeps slowing down, and a few memos and a conference call or two aren’t enough to speed it back up again.

Pitchers stroll on and off the mound like they are in a yoga session, pausing often to contemplate the meaning of the inside of their glove. Batters act like hyperactive children who can’t stop playing with their uniforms, and seem to fear the batter’s box has some sort of strange force inside it that repels them away after every pitch.

Managers change pitchers constantly in later innings, which outside of added commercial time is probably the biggest contributor to long games. The age of specialty pitchers comes with a price, and that is a long delay every time a manager plods out to the mound, signals for a reliever to plod in, and then watches as he is given even more time to warm up after already doing so in the bullpen.

And then there’s at least 40 minutes worth of commercial time for every game, while teams often stretch the breaks between innings with promotional stunts, music and videos to keep short attention spans up.

It all adds up to nine inning games averaging nearly three hours, up 18 minutes from 1981. Games like the one the White Sox and Angels played in 2:05 on Sunday are the aberration when they once were the norm and, even with that quickly played contest, games averaged 2:58 on Sunday, compared to 2:28 the same Sunday in 1968.

Blame part of that increase on simple greed. Baseball added another television commercial between innings in 1985, which increased games at least 10 minutes, and there are even more in the playoffs. Each World Series game last year averaged 3 hours, 46 minutes, ending on the East Coast long after most kids had been ordered to bed.

Predictably, both players and managers reacted to the enforcement effort by either making fun of it or saying it wasn’t necessary. Tigers manager Jim Leyland did both, first by saying he can’t hurry to the mound because he smokes three packs of cigarettes a day, and then adding that part of the allure of baseball is that it doesn’t have a clock like other sports.

“To me a baseball game is like a movie,” Leyland said. “If it’s a good movie, you stay. If it’s a bad movie, you leave.”

If people keep seeing too many bad movies, though, they stop buying tickets. Selig seems to grasp that idea, even if the people on the field don’t.

Maybe this time the umpires will do us all a favor and play along. Who knows, they might even call a high strike or two.

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(Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlberg@ap.org.)