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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
Get a vpn and problem solved.
I’m not a big watcher of the game, but I’m aware that the game has slowed down for a variety of reasons.
All the major sports leagues are concerned with the pace of their game. One reason they limit referee challenges (video review) is they delay the game.
In hockey, they found that players were taking their time getting to the faceoff circle. So they imposed a time limit. I’ve never seen it happen, but supposedly the linesman can drop the puck before the players are in place if they take too long.
From what I’ve seen, there does seem to be a propensity of players in baseball to want to lollygag.
In American football the natural inclination of the offense is to bring the pace up so as to tire out the defense. There doesn’t seem to be that kind of motivaton in baseball.
Tougher to do in baseball, because among the major sports, it’s the only one where the defense is in control of the ball the majority of time. The offense only gets to swing at it with their bats.
Its not just baseball. All sport is a mature industry now. Its only about the numbers. Nobody gets paid for having exciting sport.
There is way to much money at stake. Roger Penske said that if he spends X millions of dollars to get .5% performance increase it made sense and his team would be unbeatable.
Then you have formula 1 which is so aero dependent that nobody passes anymore. battling makes for exciting viewing, but that isn’t what gets everybody paid. What gets everybody paid is a .001% increase in aero performance.
ALMS racing had this performance balancing thing where it would adjust restrictor sizes and so forth to keep the cars competitive with each other and prevent one team from blowing out the others. But then you win by working the rules committee, and not having a faster car or better drivers(looking at you pro-drive). Unless you are particular kind of masochist I doubt that you find that very exciting.
So now autoracing is a vehicle for DRAMA of the real housewives variety, so a really expensive less entertaining Pro-Wrestling.
So to deal with that, NASCAR deployed the spec chassis and now everything is the same, and any real differentiation is purely cosmetic, and there really isn’t any point in talking about the car, (so automotive enthusiasts are disinvited from the party)
Then you get into football. You win by lengthly rules management, which are ever more complicated about what constitutes a catch and so forth.
Soccer has the infamous flop.
It all has the joy and wonder of a committee meeting for the continuous process improvement program.
At least it’s not cricket.
The Brits shared a command center with our battalion as we were jointly responsible for security of Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan. They had so many televisions playing in their area, usually with cricket games playing. I tried and tried to understand cricket but I never could.
After being married to a Brit for 22 years, I have a clue about it. But the games last for days, so you just can’t watch them.
He doesn’t watch cricket any more. When we were in Atlanta, he followed the Braves pretty religiously. Neither one of us watches much any more.
This is a great point. If you’re not actually in the stadium at the game, the pace of play is much less of an issue (I won’t quite go so far as to say *not* an issue, since you still have games going way too far into the night if you want to see the end.)
And the declining attendance says that fewer people are in the stadium these days.
Nolan Ryan, a man who knows a thing or two about pitching, thinks pitch counts are ridiculous. He would routinely throw 140+ per game. But GMs and managers are under great pressure from ownership to keep their multimillionaires on the field.
Personally, I think the combination of weight training and the radar gun is responsible for the increase in arm injuries. They’re throwing max effort on every pitch and burn themselves out. Remember the insult, “pitcher has a rubber arm?” Give me one of those guys! I’ll take a Mike Marshall or a Pedro Borbón any day of the week. When it comes to the UCL you need flexibility, not muscle mass.
In fact it’s just the opposite. Success in pitching is getting into a rhythm and repeating the most effective mechanics. Batters want to interrupt that rhythm and the only way they can do that is repeatedly step out of the box.
I recently found out that the National League did have a 20-second rule for pitchers into the 1950s. But in that pre-electronic era, there were no display clocks, so it was more like a guideline. I presume it just gave the umpire leverage to push a slow pitcher.
Who cares about arm injuries? Those are almost always temporary, and even the worst injuries don’t result in amputation. It’s a minor side effect of a multimillion dollar contract, or hope for such a contract.
I’ve no sympathy. I know too many men and women injured through repetitive motion at work making $12-$15 an hour to give one damn about pitcher arm injuries.
I like the game the way it is. The umpires work to keep things moving. I watch what I want to see on my computer, if a game gets one-sided I disappear. I don’t really know how much effect the 100-pitch limit has on increasing the game elapsed time, but I think it contributes and I have doubts about its effectiveness. I grew up with pitchers like Warren Spahn and they threw as many as twenty complete games in a season and had long careers. I watch the Nationals and it is very frustrating to see their starting pitchers pitch a great game and be removed when they are still effective, then have the middle relievers come in and start walking batters because they can’t control their pitches. That is when the pace of the game slows.
If you’re investing millions of dollars in those arms it’s quite a big deal. Also it typically takes over a year for a pitcher to recover from Tommy John surgery.
I’ve been to and watched thousands of major league baseball games over the years. The two things I’ve noticed that have slowed the game down the most are batters, not pitchers, taking a lot of unnecessary time between pitches. There are guys who step out of the box, pull off the velcro on each of their batting gloves, and then reattach it AFTER EVERY PITCH! COME ON!
And you will NEVER convince me that all of the late-inning pitching changes don’t have A LOT to do with the extra time. Every time there is a pitching change, there is a 3-minute commercial break. GIVE ME A BREAK! 10 or more pitchers in a game is very common. How ridiculous is that? Oh for the days of Nolan Ryan and Luis Tiant!
MY SOLUTIONS:
No more than three “mid-inning” pitching changes per game. Change all you want between innings.
I completely lost interest when they combined leagues and went crazy with the home runs. I’d go to a single A park if there was one near by.
They were talking about this last night. I think all of that money ball stuff has reduced the best way to win = on base percentage + home runs.
This is exactly what they were saying on WCCO last night.
Baseball and softball are very satisfying to play well. I could never hit or run that fast but if you do what your coach tells you to do it’s very satisfying.
So you never played with the ‘invisible man on first’? You not only need six or seven kids, but also a large space to play baseball. The neighbors across the alley from us (when I was growing up) had a vacant lot attached to their property, which they kept mowed. The kids in the neighborhood regularly got together to play and baseball was the preferred sport. Hot box if there were only three of us (I couldn’t throw or catch well – I’m a girl after all and my dad was a football fan), but I could run and it gave the boys practice in throwing and catching. If there weren’t any kids around the neighborhood, a two block walk (yes, walk, yes without parents) would bring you to a park with an unused, but still usable ball field. Someone always had a ball, bat and glove and was willing to play a few innings. My husband talks about playing an eternal game on the asphalt parking lot next to his school. It almost makes me cry to drive past these perfectly groomed ball fields in the suburbs with never any children playing on them.
This is one reason it hurts the team when the great starting pitchers are pulled after 100 pitches. They get a few home runs against them since that’s what the hitters do now, but they don’t walk many and don’t give up a lot of hits. I see these middle relievers enter in the sixth inning, walk two hitters, and then the chance for runs increases.
As far as a pitch clock – I’m not sure it would necessarily speed up the game if you are changing pitchers after one or two batters. I do get annoyed watching a pitcher taking his time between each pitch. I would think pitching faster (even if slightly slower) would keep the batter off his game and would result in either strikeouts or foul balls (for example, Bob Gibson – who would growl at his own catcher if he dared take a step toward the mound). I like watching the games. We watch the Cardinals on the MLB computer feed and I find the St Louis announcers fun and interesting. We tried to watch a game on ESPN, but they obviously do not even like the game, as the announcers were comparing their own socks (!) rather than calling the game. The stats part of the game is getting a little nuts (most hits on a Tuesday at home during a full moon), and I think that is interfering. If I guy is pitching well, let him pitch for heaven sake! Would like to see the umpire behind the plate replaced with auto-call once it is reliable. That might cut down on a little of the batter standing at the plate giving the umpire the evil eye, and the time wasted when the manager comes out to state his case.
The team manager and owner has always been able to limit a pitcher’s time on the mound. Coercing a limit of time on the mound is quite a different story.
It’s like a league standard now where a manager will be blamed for any arm injuries if the standard is not followed.
From an mlb.com article by Anthony Castrovince:
“63.01
This is the Major League save percentage — the third-lowest all-time, trailing only 1951 (45.1 percent) and 1974 (61.5 percent).
In a related development, the 4.50 Major League-wide relief ERA is the ninth-highest on record and the highest since 2000 (4.58).
With so many blown saves and teams increasingly rotating various guys in the closer’s role, the 40-save reliever is an endangered species. The Padres’ Kirby Yates (39) and the Yankees’ Aroldis Chapman (36) entered the week on track to get there, and the Indians’ Brad Hand (33) was right on the cusp. If we only end up with two 40-save guys, that will be the fewest since 1988 (Dan Quisenberry and Bruce Sutter).”
That’s what I’m talkin’ about.
What I find so fun about baseball is watching how one team tries to disrupt the other team’s fundamentals – keep them off balance. For example, the bunt double – a play that should be an easy out until the third baseman rushes his throw and the ball ends up in right field. Or the base-running situation that turns into some variation of hot box. ( I remember one Cards/Cubs game where the inept Cubs chased the Cardinal catcher, Ted Simmons, right across the plate.) Or, one of my favorites, the inside the park home run. And you can’t forget stolen bases.
I did actually, we called them “ghost runners.”
As a kid though I much preferred kickball over baseball. I’m much better at kicking a ball than hitting one, and as a fielder there was more action and less standing around waiting for the batter to actually put a ball in play, plus the whole dodgeball element where you could throw the ball at the runner to get him out was added fun.
Case in point: in tonight’s A’s v. Halos game, there was a lengthy pause during an at bat as the umpires put on the headsets to consult with New York… to check the count. It was 3-2. They had it right all along.
I have a fairly short attention span and I watch all or part of most Red Sox games not on the west coast. If 3:15 is a problem, what do you make of the 4-4.5 hr yankee-red sox marathons.