When he was a New York Mets baseball broadcaster, Ralph Kiner once explained how cold weather can shorten by 25 feet the distance a flyball travels: “If the fence is 338 feet (away) and you hit the ball 338 feet, you’ll be 25 feet short.” Baseball produces more numbers than numeracy.

This season, however, the revived national pastime is giving the nation a lesson in how to put the spring back in its step by taking numbers seriously enough to decisively modify them. Even if, inexplicably, you are not a fan, pause to appreciate major league baseball’s solutions to the problems caused, paradoxically, by everyone in the game behaving reasonably on the basis of accurate data.

Stuffed to the gills with “analytics” (baseball-speak for information) about pitchers’ “spin rates,” batters’ “launch angles,” etc., baseball sagged into longer nine-inning games — 3 hours and 5 minutes on average last season.

Pitchers standing 6-foot-5 and throwing more than 95 mph were overwhelming the game with velocity.

It seemed sensible to try to score with one home-run swing than by stringing together hits.

So, soon there were seasons with thousands more strikeouts than hits.

As games lengthened, action became rarer. Batters put fewer balls in play: One-third of at-bats ended in walks, strike outs or 360-foot saunters, i.e., home runs.

Fans responded by yawning, then disappearing. Annual attendance declined from 79.5 million in 2007 to 64.5 million last year.

Major league baseball’s solution this season? Change some rules, beginning with adding a pitch clock: Pitchers must deliver the ball 15 seconds (20 with runners on base) after receiving the ball from the catcher, otherwise a ball is called. If the batter is not ready with eight seconds remaining on the clock, a strike is called.

In arguably baseball’s greatest game — game seven of the 1960 World Series, when the Pirates beat the Yankees 10-9 on a walk-off home run — there was constant action and there were no strikeouts) packed into — wait for it — 2 hours and 36 minutes.

Writer Jayson Stark notes that in 2022 there were 232 nine-inning games at least 3 hours and 30 minutes long, more than one a day for six months.

If 2023’s games are on average 25 minutes shorter, this will effectively spare position players, in a six-game week, from the equivalent of a full game on their feet.

Some self-described “traditionalists” regret this restoration of traditional baseball — the game as played and experienced through most of the 20th century.

Before this season’s resurrection-through-reform, baseball was tumbling toward steadily decreased significance.

For decades, boxing was one of America’s premier pastimes.

Most people knew the names of recent and contemporary heavyweight champions: Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Joe Louis, Ezzard Charles, Jersey Joe Walcott, Rocky Marciano. Go ahead: Name today’s champion.

Baseball is reconnecting with its past and is poised to reclaim the title of national pastime. It temporarily lost this to the NFL, which, like boxing, involves the public deriving pleasure from watching athletes accept a high risk of brain damage.

Baseball has revived itself by remembering something that is encoded in America’s DNA: Impatience. One of professional baseball’s founding fathers, A.G. Spalding (1850-1915), noted, “Two hours is about as long as an American can wait for the close of a Base Ball game — or anything else, for that matter.”

A wit has wondered why fans in ballparks stand in the seventh inning to sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” when they are already there. Perhaps this is because of baseball’s glorious everydayness: “Take me out to tomorrow’s game, too.”

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day”? Not in ballparks in 2023. Fans, rescued from a creeping pace, can, unlike sourpuss Macbeth, cheerfully anticipate briskly played games tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.