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Baseball Needs a Pitch Clock. Change My Mind.
Baseball is going to die a rapid death if they don’t do something drastic about the pace of play.
I’ve had full season tickets to the Milwaukee Brewers for 25 seasons. Before I got married and had kids I always went to 70-plus games a season. I’d even take half-day vacation time to go to the weekday day games. My best season in 2001 I attended a total of 85 games (two pre-season, two road games, and all 81 home games), and I only left one game early, it was a weeknight that it went into extra innings and I was the ride for a friend who couldn’t stay any longer.
I’ve sat through to the end of 16-1 blow-out losses (“Hey, three or four grand slams, we’re right back in this one”). One of my favorite baseball memories is attending double-headers on consecutive days in July 1997 – in the first game, Steve Woodard made his major league debut against Roger Clemens, gave up a lead-off double to Otis Nixon, then proceeded to strike out the side, set a league record by striking out 11 (or was it 12?) in his debut, and won the game 1-0. In the second game of that doubleheader, the Brewers turned their first Triple play in something like 17 years.
So I take a backseat to no one claiming to be a fan of the game.
But it’s getting downright unwatchable. In 1982, the average time of a nine-inning MLB game was 2:35. In 2019 (so far), it’s 3:04.
Yes, there are more pitching changes (pitchers/game has increased from 2.62 to 4.27). But that’s not what appears to be driving the time difference.
On April 13, 1984, the Mets played the Cubs at Wrigley Field. The home team won, 11-2. Both teams combined to throw 270 pitches. Both teams combined to allow 27 baserunners, and 74 batters came to the plate. There was exactly one mid-inning pitching change.
On April 17, 2014, the Brewers played the Pirates at PNC Park. The home team won, 11-2. Both teams combined to throw 268 pitches. Both teams combined to allow 27 baserunners, and 75 batters came to the plate. There was exactly one mid-inning pitching change.
The game from 1984 lasted two hours and 31 minutes.
The game from 2014 lasted three hours and six minutes.
Our goal is to figure out where the extra 35 minutes came from.
Read the whole thing, but here’s the conclusion:
It took nine seconds longer for a pitcher to get rid of the ball in 2014.
In the 1984 game, there were 70 inaction pitches that were returned to the pitcher and thrown back to the plate within 15 seconds.
In the 2014 game, there were 10.
In the 1984 game, there were 32 balls, called strikes, or swinging strikes that took 20 seconds or more between pitches
In 2014, there were 87 balls, called strikes, or swinging strikes that took 20 seconds or more between pitches.
Baseball needs a pitch clock. And it needs to be an aggressive one. They also need to keep the batter in the box between pitches.
I like that baseball isn’t ruled by the clock. But there’s too much standing around doing nothing.
You take a nine-inning game and play it in two hours and 35 minutes, it’s a thing of beauty. You take the exact same game and stretch it out over an extra 30 minutes, it’s an unwatchable snooze-fest.
Baseball has taken some steps to speed play, but it hasn’t helped. The limit on mound visits is completely ineffectual. It’s been in place for two seasons, I can remember exactly one time when I’ve seen a team use them all (or even get down to one left).
Get the ball, throw the ball. That solves most of the problem.
Yes, Homeruns and strikeouts are up and lead to a lot of unexciting “action.” Yes, in a game last week I watched as the visiting pitcher, down 6-0 in the 8th inning, with two outs and the pitcher at-bat, threw over to 1st base five or six times in a row. Yes, the replay is a botched nightmare, and the umpires can’t call consistent balls and strikes.
None of that will matter if they can just get the game time back down to 2:45 or less.
As it is, I have a hard time getting my pre-teen kids to go to games with me. Baseball is losing a generation of fans. They don’t have much time to save the game.
Edit: As usual, the commentary clarified my thoughts a bit. So allow me to adapt one of my later comments on this thread here in the main post: I don’t want a pitch clock. I want the batter to stay in the box, and I want the pitcher to get the ball and throw the ball. But for whatever reason, they seem disinclined in recent years to do so.
What I object to is taking three hours to play a game that should only take two and a half hours.
And I’m not talking “action.” I get that baseball is about the pauses, and the four foul balls on a 3-2 count. Just do it a little quicker.
Published in Sports
IIRC, NC State and Duke played in a 12-10 thriller . . .
There are a number of small issues that when you add them up lead to a longer time to play a baseball game. Sticking to the topic of a pitch clock there are two people who control the pace.
*Yes I’m at the “get off my lawn” stage.
I want to stand up and cheer. YES!
I’m not sure when we’ll bring our kids to a game, when they might have the attention span for it. If I can’t sit through a game, how can they?
We are raising a generation of kids with shorter attention spans, and so the MLB is making it harder to pay attention? What will baseball look like in twenty or thirty years?
One of the things I noticed was that none of the pitchers had a windup. They all threw from the stretch. Is that SOP now?
The constant adjustment of batting gloves drives me crazy. Do these players get cheaply made batting gloves? Why the constant adjustment. Better yet, callous up them hands and swing the bat without em. Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays didn’t need no batting gloves. Man Up!
Dean Smith is one of histories greatest monsters. He had exciting players like Michael Jordan and James Worthy who would build up a lead then early in the second half he’d order the four corners offense turning the game into a foul shooting snooze fest. He was the only person who could hold Jordan to under 20 points.
If people don’t like the game anymore, then it’s right to die. It’s just a part of life. Baseball has had a good run. Its players are way overpaid, and the game is no longer interesting to a faster paced world.
It will linger for quite some time, but it’s rightfully dying. It’s not been our favorite past time for decades.
By what measure? They are paid the prevailing market rate for jobs that can only be filled by people with a rare skill set.
By my measure.
It’s strange that you should say that. They get paid the same as everyone else: the best wages they can negotiate with their employers.
@miffedwhitemale Nope. Politely but firmly– No! Not now. Not ever. Never. They’ve already done a few little things to speed it up–auto walk, they have shortened the time between innings, etc. BUT BASEBALL has it’s own, I think, elegant rhythm. (I’m always surprised that some people who never played the game often recognize that fact while others simply whine…!) However, speeding up a game with as much dynamic opportunity for change on virtually every pitch is a sin. Sorry.
You change, please and leave baseball alone.
Of course. My prediction is that salaries will collapse as revenue decreases. I suspect a big part of their staying afloat are the subsidized stadiums (stadia?). Soon people will be bored of baseball. It is dying.
Isn’t all of the slow rolling on getting the pitches out part of that cat and mouse game between the pitcher and the batter. A psychological war of whose nerves will break first?
The funny thing is football games I think have also gotten longer haven’t they? Because of all the pausing for evaluations of plays and rule applications?
Maybe. I went to my first game in probably 40 years last weekend. It seemed pretty vibrant to me.
But as you say, the market will determine. If the revenue isn’t there, the salaries won’t be. I’d be willing to bet that regardless of salaries, people will be willing to play baseball. As the coach told Crash Davis when asked what he got out of shepherding the pitcher through the minors “You get to keep going to the ballpark, and getting paid to do it.” My guess is that playing baseball is a lot more attractive than working on an assembly line almost regardless of the pay.
Is baseball on TV anymore? I haven’t seen any network television consistently broadcasting baseball (like the 1980s – a majority of Yankees games were broadcast – GO YANKEES!) in years. I do not mind at all sitting for hours at a stadium and enjoying the entire game; last one I went to, Yankees-Braves July or August 2008, got to see Randy Johnson pitch and Derek Jeter field.
It’s my understanding that tickets for games cost a lot of money. And that food/refreshments cost a lot of money. And… if I want to watch ball games on TV, it’s through some weird maze of free streaming or it costs a lot of money.
Are the games broadcast on radio these days?
Yes, that usually happened when he put Don Stanhouse in for later-inning relief when they were up a few runs and the opposing team would start hitting three-run homers… Seriously, though – wait, that IS what Earl Weaver would do – there is no argument against Weaver’s strategy of lucky hitters and good pitchers (except for Stanhouse). The 1970/early 1980s Orioles could be very exciting to watch, but interesting plays on their part were rare.
What happened in 1986? Before that year, we never had a season-average TOG for 9-inning games above 2:40 (160 minutes). Since that year we’ve never had one under 2:40.
Here’s the same chart with the Y-axis limited to more relevant values.
This makes clear what appears to be a couple of points where the Time Of Game changed trends dramatically.
1984-1988 saw an increase of TOG by 10 full minutes.
1998-2000 (the peak of the steroid era?) saw another big jump before it dropped back down again and stabilized.
But in 2012 things started jumping around again.
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Miffed White Male:
It’s hard to find decent numbers on TV ratings for local broadcast rights.
It’s not hard at all. In fact, in the 29 Nielsen metered markets where regional sports networks are measured baseball is king. (Toronto is not counted and Miami is – a disaster.)
These are the 2018 numbers:
But can you get composite numbers over a series of years, like we can for in-stadium attendance? That’s how we could tell if broadcast ratings overall across the leagues are making up for the drop in actual attendance.
A couple thoughts:
With just a little bit of research, yes. The above numbers came from Forbes and they’ve purchased the numbers from Nielsen for years. So start there. There are others like sportsmediawatch.com that tracks that, too.
My theory is that little league has done in baseball.
You ever read “Peanuts?” Charlie Brown manages a neighborhood team. That’s how my dad played baseball. He was a pitcher. The kids formed the teams and played each other. Parents weren’t involved.
When I was a kid we had little league but we still played neighborhood baseball outside of little league. We just weren’t organized like Charlie Brown. We’d play a game and there was nothing more to it. No kid-run league or keeping track of wins.
Nowadays kids don’t do anything without parents organizing it. Kids don’t even go down the street to visit each other without parents arranging it — and usually driving them there. Baseball has lost a lot of appeal because kids never had the experience of running the league themselves.
At least that how I see it.
You also need a critical mass of kids in the neighborhood. When I was young, just as you say, my mom would drive me to “play dates,” so I spent a lot of afternoons playing with one other kid. Two can play one-on-one basketball, or catch, but not baseball. Sometimes I’d visit a friend, who lived near several other kids our age, so we’d have 4 or as many as 6 of us. Six is perfect for a game of two-hand touch, but still not nearly enough for a proper game of baseball.
To address the original post I’ll tell you why baseball is slowing down: Speed. Before you go “WHA-?!?” let me explain.
Baseball has become addicted to numbers – from the radar to pitch counts. From Little League to the Big Leagues we have become obsessed with them. Consequently there are more pitching changes. Baseball is semi-acknowledging this with Rob Manfred’s silly “3 batter” proposal. But a rule isn’t going to fix the problem. A wholesale attitude change is needed.
I wonder if we are asking the wrong question here: how many people actually sit down and watch an entire baseball game, giving it their full attention for 9 innings, in the first place? I certainly don’t.
During the season there’s a game on most evenings, and if I’m at home and the A’s are playing the TV is usually on and tuned to that channel. That hardly means I’m sitting there paying close attention, though. I’m making dinner, eating dinner, doing the dishes, checking my email, posting on Ricochet… if something interesting actually happens, I look up. If the bases are loaded, or we need one more out to get the win, I’ll pay attention. Otherwise, I’m multi-tasking.
Yeah, I think this is right. Especially with radio broadcasts, people are often doing something while listening. But that still distinguishes it from other sports that demand your attention.
MLB players do well financially, just like the teams (unlike the NFL). Some people call that “overpaid”. The NFL doesn’t even have guaranteed contracts. All thats guaranteed for the NFL player is a lifetime disability, in many cases. Not a great career choice. High risk. 3rd world life expectancy.
I think your theory does help explain the worldwide popularity of soccer…
MLB could cap the number of pitchers on a major league roster at, say, nine, which would cut down on the middle inning relief specialists. That would leave five starters, two relievers and two middle-inning people. It would cut down on the pitching changes, but the pitch count fanatics would howl about it ruining players’ arms.
I was someone who loved playing baseball but never enjoyed watching it. That is untill I watched a little leage world series a few years ago and enjoyed it so much. It was edited a bit. However it was so much more fun to watch than MLB because there was no more than 10 to 15 secs between pitches. Watching a whole game in less than 45 mins made it so enjoyable. So make a game in under two hours. Force the game to become fast paced with count down clocks.
When kids are so much more fun to watch than the best players in the world. You dont just have a little problem.