If Commissioner Bud Selig truly wants to make baseball games shorter, he might want to tell Derek Jeter and every other member of the Yankees and the Red Sox to pick up the pace when they meet again at Fenway Park on Friday.

For all his accomplishments, Jeter is also a classic out-of-the-batter’s-box dawdler. His three-to-six-step amble between pitches helped pile on the minutes in the three games that Boston and the Yankees played in Fenway at the start of the season, games that took so long that the veteran umpire Joe West denounced the first two of them as “pathetic and embarrassing.”

Those three games lasted 3 hours 46 minutes, 3:48 and 3:21, the final one a relatively speedy affair considering it went to 10 innings. West was on the field for all 10 hours 55 minutes of the three games, so no wonder he was annoyed. And now, a month later, the Yankees and the Red Sox are right back at it, teams known for games that seem to go on forever, even if they are often meaningful and tense.

Image Yankees outfielders during a pitching change against Boston on April 4. Credit... Jim Davis/The Boston Globe

The length of baseball games has been an issue that has vexed Selig for years and it is a key item on the agenda of the 14-member committee that Selig has formed to suggest improvements to the sport. For starters, the panel might want to take a look at Game 2 of that Yankees-Red Sox series, the one that lasted 3:48 on April 6 and ended with the Yankees winning, 6-4, in nine innings.