BOSTON — I used to love playoff baseball.

No more.

I used to think there was nothing better in sports than the theater of postseason baseball, with its pageantry and its drama and its tradition.

But now?

Now I think the games are simply too long.

The length of games has been a problem for a while now, with four-hour games not uncommon, when once upon a time games routinely were played in 2 1/2 hours.

And if anyone needed a reminder about how much this has all changed, Sunday night’s game just about said it all, a game that seemed like a sentence, not a chance to watch playoff baseball.

But where to begin?

Is it with the most obvious fact it took five hours and 19 minutes to play, the longest in first-round history?

That was one thing, certainly, the fact that Sunday’s game was the baseball version of a long day’s journey into night, as if Eugene O’Neil was the Sox manager instead of Terry Francona.

Think about that for a second.

Roll it around on your tongue. Five hours and 19 minutes. About the time it takes to fly across the country. Five hours and 19 minutes to watch a baseball game.

Is it with the fact that the game ended after 12:30 a.m., the bewitching hour for just about anything, never mind a baseball game that had started at 7:30 p.m.?

But those are just the obvious things.

How about the fact that the first half of the first inning took nearly a half-hour?

This is suspense?

Please.

This is a waste of everyone’s time.

Because let’s put this in the real world for a second.

You wouldn’t go to a movie that was five hours and 19 minutes long. No one would. You wouldn’t go to a concert that lasted five hours and 19 minutes unless you were a kid and you thought it was a Woodstock imitation. Truth be told, there are very few things in this life I’m going to spend five hours doing, and watching a baseball game isn’t one of them.

Not in a perfect world, anyway.

But Sunday night was not a perfect world, and the fact Josh Beckett was struggling had nothing to do with it.

It was the fact he took nearly a minute to throw a pitch. It was the fact that Jason Varitek came out three times in the inning to huddle with him. It was the fact that Beckett treated a runner at second base as if he wasn’t allowed to be there, acting like if he just kept staring at him without throwing the ball to the plate maybe he would go away.

It was the fact that Beckett all but slowed the game to a stop by himself, by his refusal to adhere to the supposed rule that pitchers are supposed to throw the ball within 20 seconds of receiving it.

It was all of those things, and it made the first inning interminable, setting the tone for the rest of the evening, one that ended after midnight and no doubt had, in the spirit of Pedro, “shutting it down” before the game actually ended.

It’s bad enough when you fall asleep watching games from the coast that simply start too late.

It’s another when you can’t stay awake for a game in Boston that starts at 7:30.

That’s baseball’s fault.

And if once upon a time one of the beauties of baseball is that it didn’t have a clock, that’s simply been abused, to the point that now too many of these games have been ordeals to be endured, as much as they are games to enjoy.

Sunday night was Exhibit A. By the end of the game I was all but praying for it to end, and once upon a time that’s not the way I used to think about playoff games. And yesterday morning all I heard was people saying that they had eventually turned it off, that they had tried to watch it, but ultimately had surrendered.

In short?

This game needs a shot clock.

It needs pitchers to be forced to throw the ball in a certain time frame, whether it’s 20 seconds, or whatever. The point is it has to be enforced.

It needs batters to not be allowed to keep stepping out of the box.

It needs to find ways to speed things up.

For we know there are more commercials than there used to be, and we know the game is managed differently than it once was, with situational pitchers used more than they once were, a succession of moves that often grind games to a stop in the late innings.

Still, it’s gotten out of control.

And no one benefits by it.

If we are spoiled around here, by the fact that Fenway has become a nightly love fest and that the Sox have been so successful the past few years, there are reasons why in many baseball cities around the country you almost can’t give the tickets away.

These are warning signs.

And the lords of baseball ignore them at their peril.

I’m just one small example.

Because I used to love postseason baseball.

No more.

breynold@projo.com