Baseball is becoming dull, and the strikeout is to blame.

I woke up early today, with the TV still running, and while looking for the NBA playoffs I came across the New York Yankees and Chicago Cubs, at Wrigley Field, just as the bottom of the ninth was happening.

I decided to stay with it and see how Aroldis Chapman fared in his chance to close out the game.

He failed, the Cubs scoring three to tie, the third “driven in” by Mike Rizzo, who allowed a ball to bang off his arm with the bases loaded.

That led to nine more innings of baseball, and lots and lots of strikeouts. To the point that the game I was watching set a Major League record for most strikeouts in a game. (Which is, perhaps, the first MLB record I have seen “live”.)

Forty-eight whiffs. A four followed by an eight. 48. Shattering the previous record of 43, set in 1971 by the Angels and Athletics, who needed 20 innings to get to that number. (The Cubs and Yankees zoomed past it in the 17th.)

And it reminded me how the strikeout often is the dullest event in the game, and lots of people think baseball already is plenty dull.

I saw this a lot: Batter takes a mighty swing at a ball not even in the strike zone, then turns and takes a walk back to the dugout.

Extra innings began with 10 consecutive batters striking out — three Yankees in the top of the 10th, three Cubs in the bottom, three more Yankees in the top of the 11th, the leadoff man for the Cubs in the bottom of the inning. It was about 30 minutes of no one putting the ball in play. It was awful.

What gets me about strikeouts is that 1) no longer is any shame attached to striking out, which is a fairly recent development; Bobby Bonds was notorious for striking out a record 189 times in 1970, a mark that stood for 34 years; since then, 21 whiffier seasons have been turned in, all but one in this century; 2) we are seeing more Ks than ever; five guys (Joey Gallo, Miguel Sano, Trevor Story, Chris Davis and Jonathan Villar) are on pace to break Mark Reynolds’s 2009 record for whiffing, 223; and 3) baseball continues to encourage guys to swing with all their might, while upper-cutting, in search of home runs, which in themselves offer only fleeting excitement.

Would I would love to see is more contact.

Any ground ball, any pop-up is more interesting than 95 percent of bases-empty whiffs.

Any three singles are more interesting than a solo home run. A triple and a ground ball is more exciting than a solo home run.

What baseball ought to consider is pushing back the fences 10-15 feet at every park that can absorb the space.

What is going on here is that the 1960s and 1970s stadiums, often meant to be multi-purpose, have been phased out (only Oakland’s remains in use) and replaced in almost all cases with more homer-friendly stadiums.

It has led to more big, clumsy sluggers who go to the plate intending to get three big swings, guys with muscles but marginal skills. Brutal in the field, no speed, lousy on-base percentages. (But they can hit a ball 450 feet, about once a week.)

If we could get bigger outfields in a dozen-plus big-league parks, maybe we would have a few more athletes in the game, and more line drives, more doubles, more triples (the most exciting play in baseball) — and fewer strikeouts from the big-fly-or-nothing clods who mar every team in ball.

I saw 25 whiffs in nine innings. That should have been enough to put me back to sleep.