As Cliff Lee placed his glove in front of his face and began his windup to start the seventh inning of Monday's Game 5, Yankees catcher Jorge Posada raised his hand to ask for time and stepped from the batter's box. The pitch hit the strike zone, home plate umpire Dana Demuth signaled strike and the Citizens Bank Park crowd of 46,178 bellowed a lusty approval.

No one is quite sure when an umpire was last cheered in this manner in a World Series, or whether it had ever happened before at all. No one is quite sure what the World Series record for trips to the mound is either, only that it is annoyingly clear that Posada has eclipsed the single-inning mark, the single-game mark, and already must own the record for the most trips to the mound for a World Series.

And that's counting when they played nine games back in the day.

"I do believe it's a concern on the part of baseball," Fox Sports president and executive producer Ed Goren said yesterday from New York. "I've been around enough baseball people recently to know there is frustration there."

Before I go any further let me say this: Jorge Posada has every right to call as many timeouts he feels he needs to get his signals straight, settle down his pitchers, discuss strategy. Honestly, if you're a Phillies fan, don't you wish Carlos Ruiz had called time on Sunday to discuss covering third base?

Posada is playing by the rules, which is to say there is no rule that limits a catcher's trips to the mound, a second baseman's trips to the mound, even a rightfielder's trips to the mound. A manager or coach can visit the mound once an inning before he must change pitchers, but any of the nine guys on the field can ask for a timeout any time they want, as many times as they want.

In other words, Andy Reid and Donovan McNabb would love this league.

There are a whole lot of reasons for doing this, of course, which the Yankees catcher and his pitching coach are quick to point out. To calm a pitcher down. To go over signs, change them if there is even the thought that the other team is stealing them, which there allegedly is with the Phillies.

And then there is this one, offered after Sunday's game by Dave Eiland, the Yankees pitching coach.

"Sometimes it's a momentum-breaker," he said. "If we feel like they have the momentum we kind of want to take a little momentum timeout and stop it and regroup, and I want to make sure the pitcher's mind is right."

This is so unfair on so many levels. The other night, with two men on, two out, Posada went out to the mound four times with Jayson Werth at the plate. He went to the mound a total of eight times that inning.

Werth stood and waited each time, finally striking out on a 2-2 pitch well out of the strike zone, quashing a Phillies' rally.

Was Werth affected? Probably. Is that fair play? Probably not. Batters don't get the same opportunity. After a few seconds, they are told to step back in. If they call time too often, they suffer the fate Posada did the other night.

Eiland argued that restricting such timeouts would "take away the beauty of the game," but Demuth's called strike on Posada was not about art appreciation. Quite the contrary.

Eiland also said this: "There's no rules against it, and I don't see any rules changing for that. That would be ridiculous."

Really, ridiculous is subjecting fans, both at home and in the park, to such delays - especially on 48-degree nights. Reflecting the blissful ignorance of so many in the game as to who pays their wages, Eiland said, "Don't take 3 minutes between innings. You know how many times a pitcher is standing on the mound waiting for the umpire's call to throw the first pitch?"

Yes. But does he know how many years of his salary the revenue from one of those minutes represents?

Those trips to the mound? They cost the game. If you listen close, you can hear the sound of remote controls across this great land.

Goren treads carefully here. He insists Fox will not pressure baseball to fix this in the offseason, that, "It's their game, we cover sports." But the length of games, he said, which has averaged a humane 3 hours, 25 minutes so far this series, "is an issue for us.

"It's why we moved the start times to 7:57. Because of longer and longer games that were going on to midnight and beyond."

Mike Port, Major League Baseball's vice president of umpiring, told the Associated Press that mound meetings would be a topic among baseball officials this offseason. And that was before Posada wore out the grass between home and the mound in Game 4.

In the meantime, it might be helpful to keep a crossword puzzle handy.

And - crazy as it sounds - be thankful for umpires like Demuth.

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