To borrow and shamelessly recast a mantra of the 60s: A
baseball game needs a clock like a fish needs a bicycle. Nevertheless, major league baseball games
now have, of all things, clocks. Their purpose: to enforce rules aimed at
speeding the pace of the game, something a small but vocal segment of
baseballdom has been obsessing over for years, repeatedly (and annoyingly)
offering up various stratagems for “saving” time having mostly to do with how
long a pitcher can take between pitches and whether or not a batter will be
allowed to step out to knock dirt out of his spikes and adjust his, um,
equipment.
That group has finally gotten its way. So now…
·
Batters
must keep one foot in the box at all times, except after foul balls, steals and
other scenarios that can occur during an at-bat.
·
Breaks
between half-innings are timed. Once there are three outs, a timer will be set
(2:25 for local games, 2:45 for national broadcasts), requiring pitchers and
hitters to be ready for action when the timer winds down to 20 seconds.
·
There
will also be a timer for pitching changes, with a maximum break of 2:30. The
clock starts when the new pitcher crosses the warning track or foul line onto
the field.
Pitch
clocks haven’t been instituted yet in the majors, but will be. They are now being used in AA and AAA games.
All of this, of course, is a solution in search of a
problem.
One
sportswriter characterized the “problem” this way: “Anyone who has attended a
baseball game in recent years, whether it’s the big leagues, the minors or even
tee ball, will tell you that baseball is too slow, an increasingly plodding
exercise.”
In
fact, no one has told me that. In recent years, or ever. No one, except this tiny but apparently
influential group of nattering nabobs of negativism. Not once, as I’ve left a game, have I heard anyone say,
“boy, am I glad that’s over; that last twelve minutes was torture,” so it
doesn’t appear that this perceived need is in response to any outcry from the
fans, who continue to vote -- when it comes to the attractiveness of major
league baseball games as an entertainment alternative, at whatever duration --
with their feet. As for its being “an
increasingly plodding exercise” I say, nonsense, it’s the same plodding exercise
it has always been.
My theory is that all this comes mainly from (a) that
generation of sportswriters that is emotionally and intellectually, to put it
delicately, not fully evolved, and who’ve been chronically over-stimulated by
video games and trash sports and therefore tend to be rendered cranky by
anything short of relentless high-intensity action and continual motion; and
(b) team owners, whose principle interests in being connected in any way with
baseball have to do with money and bragging rights but do not extend to
actually liking the game, and whose top priority when in attendance at one is
figuring out the earliest possible inning they can exit the premises without
jeopardizing their reputations as passionate devotees of the sport.
I think what both of these groups really believe, deep down,
is that baseball is fundamentally boring, and therefore the shorter the games,
the better. What they offer as their
public rationale, on the other hand, is that (at least as I understand it)
games would be more to the liking of the public if they were ten or twelve
minutes shorter, and that more people would therefore attend games than already
do. The whole thing makes little sense,
and when subjected to even the most rudimentary analysis, pretty much falls
apart. To wit…
How long is a piece of
string? Apparently the shortening
crowd hasn’t noticed that not all baseball games are the same length. In fact, generally speaking, no two games are the same length, rendering
any talk of cutting the length of an average
game meaningless. Is a 4:10 game
improved by cutting its length by 12 minutes?
A 2:38 game? A 1:55 game. Well…no, no, and no. So if there’s a need for ball games to be
shorter, the question has to asked – shorter than what? And of course the duration of virtually
every game is determined not by the dawdling of the pitcher but by his overall
effectiveness; that is to say, games featuring the most offense, which this
crowd admittedly likes best, take the longest.
Pitchers’ duels, for which they have the least affinity, are the shortest. Go figure.
The bottom line here: Ball games
take a couple or three hours, and if twelve minutes are trimmed from them, they
will still take a couple or three hours.
Why is there so much
downtime in baseball? There
isn’t. Baseball has somewhat more of it
than hockey and basketball and considerably less of it than football, a sport
which uses about thirty seconds of planning and discussion (the huddle) for
every ten seconds of action (the play) and which stops every game dead in its
tracks, exactly in the middle of the action, for 30 to 60 minutes. There seems to be some confusion over
whether all these pace-of-game measures are aimed at overall game length or
within-game inaction, but the accusation that baseball is “slow” and needs to
be “speeded up” clearly comes from people who are interested in the game only
when balls are flying out of the park or bases are being feverishly
circled. They disdainfully refer to
people who are actually interested in other less frenetic parts of the game,
which is most of the people who watch baseball regularly, as “purists.” For these millions who actually enjoy the
game, the almost infinitely variable interplay of pitcher vs. hitter –
something that takes up more of a baseball game than any other single activity
– is not downtime. But for the
shorter-is-better crowd, it is.
In a seeming paradox, from the same sort of mindset
that is always arguing for the shortening of baseball games comes the
increasingly strident bitching about baseball officiating and the grand
injustices visited upon the hometown heroes because of it, and consequent
calls for stepped-up use of video replay to set things right. Waiting for yes-or-no decisions to be made by way of video playback has become a significant yawn-time contributor. But it’s not a really a paradox. Both ideas spring from the mind of the
literalist – the sort of person who knows the price of everything and the value
of nothing; the sort of person who can get way down in the weeds and ferret out
facts that he then draws like a gun, but who is congenitally unable to see the
big picture.
