All right already, enough is too much.
That’s exactly my feeling about the pitch clock and the impact it has had on baseball. When it comes to the amount of time it takes to play an average game, the pitch clock is vastly overrated. It actually accounts for only a small percentage of the “saved” time throughout the course of nine innings, a fact that is as easily documented as it has been ignored.
Here’s what you really need to know about the new, streamlined 2023 version of baseball: It has very little to do with the number of seconds between pitches — and everything to do with minutes between innings, the elephant in the room that has been ignored for years in hopes it would go away. Make no mistake about this — the “between innings clock” is most responsible for the shortened games.
It should be noted that the clock itself has been a good thing, and without question has done its job. It’s the “pitching” part that is an issue. When I see a headline that says: “Baseball pitch clock has transformed game length,” which I did recently, I want to scream “Hogwash,” or another two-syllable word with similar emphasis. The pitch clock, simply put, is getting way too much credit for what otherwise is a good thing.
There’s no question that mine is a decidedly minority opinion that needs explanation. But this has as much to do with what hasn’t been done in the past as it does with the drastic changes Major League Baseball made this year. The company line from the start has been that these changes were about pace, not length, of the games, which is borderline propaganda at best — because it’s always been about getting games over earlier, which simply put means playing faster.
No question it has improved pace as well, which admittedly is a good thing, but there is more to it than the company line that, among other things, promotes “more action,” when in fact it’s the same amount of action — you just get to see it sooner. And don’t even talk to me about stolen bases, which already were running at the highest success rate in history — and are generally regarded as the most overrated statistic in the game.
Make no mistake about it, MLB has done a good job in regards to speeding up play, and an even better job promoting as much. After a little more than one-third of a season, the average playing time is down almost a half hour, from 3:03:00 year a year ago to about 2:36:00 depending on when the measurements were taken. And, believe it or not, I applaud that.
What’s bothersome is that MLB could’ve achieved very close to the same results without going overboard with some of the gingerbread add-ons — like time between pitches, restricting pickoff throws and/or “disengagements” — merely by enforcing rules that were already in place.
Baseball has a long history of not enforcing certain things in the rulebook — blocking home plate, or any base, without the ball, for instance, or the phantom play at second base during a double play. It took a broken leg by Buster Posey to fix the former and the influence of replay technology to clean up the area around second base.
For years MLB has had a “rule” calling for a period of two minutes and 15 seconds between every half inning that in reality was little more than a suggestion. “We never enforced it because there was no penalty,” a retired umpire friend told me at the start of this season. “Now there are consequences and they’ve been told to be strict.”
For the record, elapsed time between innings this year is 2:05 for local broadcasts and 2:25 for national games, with some exceptions for special seventh-inning events. I can attest those time limits are being strictly enforced.
In each of the Orioles’ road trips thus far, I’ve picked a handful of games and used my smartphone Dick Tracy watch to time the break between each half-inning and not once has it gone over two minutes. On occasion there have even been times when a pitch or two was missed before the telecast resumed.
A year ago, I did several similar surveys in my futile attempt to prove the elephant in the room, time between innings, was the real culprit. I could count on one hand the number of times there were less than three minutes between innings and many times it was 3:30 or more, a very drastic difference.
During spring training I had an interesting conversation about the pitch clock with Tim Naehring, vice president of baseball operations for the Yankees. He, like most veteran baseball executives, was all-in with the “pros” of the rule while I was a clear loser with my “con” arguments.
But during that discussion Tim shared a text he got from a scout friend that showed an image of Rule 33 of a rulebook of undetermined origin that revealed that a pitch clock existed long ago. The rule? That if a pitcher failed to deliver a pitch in less than 20 seconds he shall be charged with a ball.
What couldn’t be determined was how long ago this rule existed, but there is a place to go to find out about this kind of stuff. With the aid of Jon Shestakofsky, vice president of communications and education for the Baseball Hall of Fame, and Tom Shieber, senior curator for the Hall of Fame, it was discovered that the rule was introduced before the 1901 season under the heading of “Delaying the Game,” and though the rule changed numbers in between it stayed until the book was revamped in 1950.
More than a century ago they might’ve had to use a sundial rather than a clock, but apparently pitchers were deemed culprits when it came to slowing down play. That thought continued for a long time, but then batting gloves, wrist bands and protective gear came into play and the onus shifted to hitters and their penchant for getting in and out of the batter’s box whenever the mood struck.
Which (finally) brings us to the point — how baseball could achieve the desired result without a pitch clock. We already know (even if MLB hasn’t told us) that time saved between innings (16-17 minutes) is more than half the difference between this year and last. Factor in strict time between batters (30 seconds, sorry about those short walk-up tunes), one timeout per at-bat, reduced video reviews because of shortened time allowed to make challenges (a big amen to that), plus the general acceptance that pace of play doesn’t mean at your leisure, I believe you can conservatively add another 6-7 minutes.
All of which adds up to 22-24 minutes, which is without a pitch clock, pickoffs, disengagements, etc. etc. etc. — and only 3-5 minutes off the average time of game during the first third of this year. Most of my peers and associates in and around the game are in love with the new pace of baseball, and I have to respect that. But I believe, and I think they would agree, that cerebral is a big part of baseball — and an awful lot of it takes place between pitches.
It’s hard for me to believe that’s not worth more than those 3-5 minutes per game. But I also realize you can’t put the paste back in the tube, that the price of crabs won’t go down in a plentiful year, and that baseball isn’t likely to change gears, even if the numbers suggested it could be a good thing. My fondest hope is that all of those who embrace the changes that brought the pitch clock into play can enjoy the game as much as whatever it is they do with their 27-30 minutes of extra leisure time.
I’ve often been told that I’m part of a demographic — traditionalist to be polite, old fart to be blunt — that does not appeal to baseball, or perhaps any other sport for that matter. Everything is geared to the younger generations — and the avalanche of gambling opportunities, which all sports have embraced.
Baseball used to be known as the worst sport for gambling because everything revolved around starting pitchers. That’s no longer the case, especially with so few of them around at payoff time. With every pitch, batter, inning, game, score — straight up, over, under or parlays all in play, baseball may now be the most enticing of all for the instant gratification crowd.
Jim Henneman can be reached at JimH@pressboxonline.com
Photo Credit: Kenya Allen/PressBox
Originally published June 15, 2023