Baseball players aren’t used to watching clocks.
But that changes this season. Major League ballparks have installed timers for the commercial
breaks between innings, requiring players to resume the game as soon as those clocks
hit zero. It’s one of the small steps the league is
taking to speed up the pace of play after average game times hit a record high in 2014
- 3 hours and 8 minutes. It would be one thing if those 3 hour games
were action-packed, but actually both hits and runs per game are down in recent years.
So what’s going on?
It’s like watching Lord of the Rings 160 times in 6 months or something.
Every night you’ve got Lawrence of Arabia.
This is Grant, he watches baseball sometimes. I watch probably about 200 baseball games
a year. He says there’s no one thing slowing down
the pace of play. But part of it is that the some of the players are kind of dawdling.
The time between pitches has gone up. Last season pitchers took an average of 23
seconds between pitches. There’s actually a rule on the books that
the pitcher has to throw the ball within 12 seconds if the bases are unoccupied. But it
hasn’t been enforced. Just limiting pitchers to 20 seconds would
cut around 15 minutes of game time. The off-season league started testing a pitch
clock last year — 20 seconds without a pitch and the umpires calls an automatic ball.
That’s something that may be coming to the majors next.
If they already have the clocks in place for between innings, I don’t think they’re
going to be too delicate with the idea of a pitch clock.
It’s not just pitchers that set the pace though. Batters have their own bad habits.
This year, they can be fined $500 if they don’t keep one foot in the batters box between
pitches. But there’s a pretty long list of exceptions.
Still some players are not happy about this. I call that bullshit.
Batters are already at a disadvantage in this era of hard-throwing pitchers and stricter
drug testing. It can be a strategic move to be able to slow things down.
If you force a hitter to do that, 70% you are out because you don’t have no time to
think. But baseball purists say if you go back and
watch classic games, before velcro gloves, before players came on the field with a soundtrack,
there was a lot less fiddling going on at the plate.
Some other factors are a bit harder to tackle. There’s been a shift in how teams deploy
their pitchers, and it has to do with something called a loogy.
Lefty one out guy. It’s a pitcher brought in just to face a
left handed batter. And it’s one of the ways that the bullpen has become more specialized,
which means more pitchers playing in each game than before.
You’ve got the loogy, maybe two loogys, 7th inning guy, 8th inning guy, maybe a couple
of 8th inning guys then 9th inning guy. More relief pitchers mean more game delays
and more commercial breaks. But it’s working for the teams so, this trend is probably here
to stay. The new instant replay process may have also
helped slow down games last year. In theory, reviewing calls should eliminate arguments
on the field, but it ended up that managers were stalling while their bench coach tried
to decide whether to use their challenge. New rules this year should keep the managers
in the dugout during challenges. The league hopes that by cutting out some
of the dead time in the game, they’ll make baseball more palatable for young people whose
attention span can’t survive the 23 seconds between pitches.
Baseball knows that it has the oldest demographic of the four major North American sports and
it’s not particularly close. But here’s the thing -- football games are
actually longer than baseball games, with more dead time and more commercials. And the
kids love football. But it doesn’t hurt to try. And there’s
one way that baseball could become more relevant rather than less, in this era of constant
digital noise. I think baseball can survive as something
of an oasis around that. Where people come and say we need at least
one leisurely sport that we can go to and just relax. And if we miss an inning,you know,
we’re not going to feel bad. We’re going to go to the park and sit in the sun for the
whole express purpose of a leisurely game with punctuated bursts of excitement.