Major League Baseball hits home run with pitch clock | Editorial
Baseball is a game of endless traditions — some written, some passed down from player to player and team to team. The game “is like church,” said legendary manager Leo Durocher. “Many attend, few understand.” But one thing had become clear in recent years: The average Major League Baseball game was taking too long. The league had to do something. To its credit, it did — something drastic, in fact. The league added a clock to a game that, from its early roots, had never been in a hurry.
While often languid, baseball games did not always take so long to end. As that game took hold as the nation’s pastime in the early 1900s, games routinely ended in less than two hours. In 1919, the New York Giants took just 51 minutes to beat the Philadelphia Phillies 6-1, still considered the shortest game in major league history. Even in 1980, the average game lasted a reasonable two hours and 33 minutes. But in more recent years, game times crept past three hours, stretched by a combination of more TV commercials, more total pitches and pitchers and batters taking too much time between each pitch. Seriously, flowers have bloomed in the time it took some batters to get ready for the next low and away fastball.
What to do. What to do.
Enter the pitch clock. The idea was to force pitchers to throw the next pitch in a certain amount of time, and for batters to be ready. Sacrilege! cried some baseball diehards. A clock will ruin the game! Major League Baseball did it anyway. Starting this season, pitchers have 15 seconds between pitches to deliver the next pitch, and 20 seconds if there’s a base runner. Players get 30 seconds between batters to resume play.
And it worked. In fact, it’s been a home run. In the first week, the average game lasted two hours and 37 minutes. Pitchers mostly seem to like it. League officials love it. It’s only been a week, but many fans say they do, too. What about the Tampa Bay Rays? The team has yet to lose under the new rules. As of Thursday, the Rays were the only remaining undefeated team in all of Major League Baseball. The length of the team’s first six games: two hours 14 minutes, 2:48, 2:10, 2:25, 2:45 and 2:32. Yes, correlation isn’t causation — and the sample size is small — but the pitch clock and the Rays are early season breakouts.
For some, baseball will always be slow, hidebound, boring. They are wrong, of course. But the deeper reminder here is that if a game as steeped in — and shackled by — tradition can make such a bold and smart change, what’s stopping the rest of us? The author John Irving wrote that baseball “is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action.” It still is, but Major League Baseball has ensured that fans no longer have to wait so long to find out who wins.
Editorials are the institutional voice of the Tampa Bay Times. The members of the Editorial Board are Editor of Editorials Graham Brink, Sherri Day, Sebastian Dortch, John Hill, Jim Verhulst and Chairman and CEO Conan Gallaty. Follow @TBTimes_Opinion on Twitter for more opinion news.
