KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Fifteen point eight seconds. He kicks the dirt a little, ruffles his glove, maybe adjusts his cap, or maybe not, because adjusting his cap takes time, and he doesn't have time. He has 15.8 seconds. It's not a countdown. It's an internal clock, a metronome, a cadence. Rock and fire. Rock and fire. It's almost symphonic, the way Mark Buehrle works a baseball game from atop a pitcher's mound. He throws a pitch every 15.8 seconds, a full 2.1 seconds quicker than the second-most expedient pitcher. To call it anything short of glorious would do it an injustice.

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Baseball games feel like they last forever these days because they do. Only 20 of 291 pitchers with at least 10 innings this season have taken fewer than 20 seconds to throw a pitch. Five years ago, 107 pitchers worked in less than 20. Since baseball began keeping track electronically in 2007, the longest Buehrle has taken was 18.1 seconds last year, and that was too long.

"You see guys get in the batter's box," Buehrle says. "They listen to their song for 20 minutes. They don't swing the bat and they have to step out and tighten their batting gloves and do their stuff. I don't like sitting on the bench for a four-hour game when I'm not pitching, I'll tell you that much. When you're sitting there in between your start, looking at the scoreboard, looking at the clock, saying, 'Holy [expletive], this is ridiculous.' I know how fans feel."

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Eighty-three point two miles per hour. It's the slowest average fastball in baseball outside of R.A. Dickey's, and seeing as Dickey is a knuckleball pitcher and he throws only 1.2 mph slower, that's not exactly a point of pride. The only onomatopoeia the fastball invokes is "Pffffffft," like a deflating balloon. Calling it a fastball is actually kind of insulting to real fastballs. There are 56 starting pitchers whose changeups are faster than Mark Buehrle's left-handed fastball.

"I hit 87 last start," Buehrle says, and he sounds proud, which he should, considering it took Jamie Moyer until his 40th birthday to throw a fastball as slowly as Buehrle does at 34 years old.

He maxed out at 85 mph on Thursday. Once. "Over-under is 84 ½," says Aaron Loup, his Toronto Blue Jays teammate. "So he's over." The rest of his fastballs hovered between 81 and 84, his cutter floating from 76-83, his changeup in the same neighborhood with a few mph off the top end, his curve detonating at 69-74. He induced more foul balls than strikes looking and three times as many of those as strikes swinging. There were five whiffs in all, four of them from Justin Maxwell, who swings and misses at one of every six pitches he sees, so those barely count.

The numbers are so counterintuitive to success today, so diametrically opposed to a game that hungers for velocity and power because finesse and success are greater bedfellows in rhyme than truth. Nobody does what Mark Buehrle does. Nobody. And it's spectacular.

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Two hundred innings. He's going to do it again, you know. He's going to tie Christy Mathewson and Greg Maddux. And with another year, he's going to be up there with Don Sutton and Gaylord Perry. And two after that, if he's not so bored that he goes home with the $120 million or so in riches he has amassed, most of it rag-armed, he will tie Warren Spahn for a record that was remarkable then and flat inconceivable today.

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