Mike's Mets - The Pitch Clock Is Working

 

By Mike Steffanos

I was skeptical of the pitch clock when it was first proposed, but it's undoubtedly improving MLB games.

I'm 64 years old and have been a Major League Baseball fan my whole life. Like most folks my age, I'm already quite set in my ways. The only thing keeping me from going full-on miserable curmudgeon is that I've also learned not to take myself too seriously. When I heard about all the rule changes coming to MLB this season, I wasn't entirely on board with what they were proposing. In particular, the idea of a clock on a baseball field seemed antithetical to a sport that has operated without one for over 150 years.

While the idea of a pitch clock admittedly made some sense, given the tediousness of watching batters step out and readjust their batting gloves after... every... single... pitch, the idea of the thing really went against the grain. If you ask a true baseball fan what separates this game from every other major team sport, most would tell you it's the only one not ruled by a clock. But now you have one right behind home plate, relentlessly ticking away. 30 seconds between batters. 15 seconds between pitches to the same batter. 20 seconds when anyone is on base. The catcher has to be in the catcher's box at least 9 seconds before the clock strikes zero. The batter has to be in the batter's box with his eyes on the pitcher with 8 seconds left. Batters can only call time out once in an at bat.

Essentially, this new pitch clock controls everything that happens in a ball game. In many ways, it feels very wrong to me. But, as game times crept longer and longer every year, it became clear that something absolutely had to be done. In the Wildcard series against the Mets last October, the Padres hitters made a point of slowing the Mets pitchers down. It was legal and probably a smart move for San Diego, but anyone watching the game who wasn't a fan of either team likely found the strategy and the resulting slowdown in action uncompelling. The biggest problem in baseball in recent seasons hasn't really been the length of the game. Rather, the length of time without any action on the field poses the greatest challenge in attracting new fans and even keeping the ones baseball already has.

The glacial pace of baseball games we've seen in the last few years is a relatively recent development. If you check out this page on the Baseball Reference site, you can see how the average length of a 9-inning game has crept steadily higher year by year. In 1969, my first year as a Mets fan, the average 9-inning game was 2:28 long. 10 years later, in 1979, 9-inning games averaged 2:31. This started changing more noticeably by the mid-1980s. In 1986, when the Mets last won a championship, the average 9-inning game time jumped to 2:48. In 2000, when the Mets next appeared in the World Series, 9-inning games averaged 3:01 — more than 1/2 hour longer than in 1969. Last year the average was 3:06.

At least in my case, it wasn't the extra 1/2 hour or so of game time that was the problem. It was the time between pitches with all of the gamesmanship going on. Except in moments when the game was on the line, some of this stuff was just plain boring. For people who didn't already love baseball, this was a huge turnoff. You could see why kids weren't embracing the sport as most of us did when we were young.

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