You have eight seconds to step into the batter’s box and start reading this text
“Baseball is boring.” “It’s slow.” “You just drink beer and barely pay attention to the game.” I know. I suppose this makes it different from other sports, because it’s a pastime first and entertainment second, because a team plays 81 home games in a season, because the thing is three and a half hours long.
The game has gotten longer over my lifetime. It was two and a half hours long, on average, when I was born. But there were no time limits on pitchers or batters, and both sides would hedge as long as possible in order to mess with each other.
The days of this are coming to a merciful, chaotic end. Several things are happening in 2023:
- They are making the bases very slightly larger, mostly in order to encourage stealing (action!) and reduce collisions (no violence!).
- The “shift” is now effectively banned, which was a thing that would happen when the defending team would cram most of their players right in the trajectory of where a hitter was likely to bat. This allows more people to get on base, which, again: action!
- There is a pitch clock.
The pitch clock came after years of debate, alpha testing, beta testing, pushback from the players union, pushback from umpires, and pushback from the only people who really matter: fans.
MLB attendance has steadily declined over the years. Today, nobody in their right mind is going to call baseball America’s most beloved or popular sport anymore. You are correct to be bored by baseball, because large swaths of baseball really are boring, and watching baseball has largely become a matter of sniffing out when the non-boring parts are happening. (This may take hours. It may be never.)
And so the clock. It feels like a bit of a last-ditch – or, more charitably, a correction, a snapping back into form of a sport that really should be less awkwardly, slowly paced. It is speeding up the game, as predicted, and it is also adding my absolute favorite thing to have happen in baseball: abject chaos.
Nobody knows what to do with the clock. Batters have to step in the box by a certain time, or the clock goes off and they are given a strike. Pitchers have to throw by a certain time, or a ball is awarded. In more severe infractions, a balk automatically puts the batter on base. Pickoffs are even restricted: two per at-bat.
You do not need to know the clock rules, only that the clock exists, and the umpires are being hilariously unforgiving about it. In a sport where its pacing and psychic contours are largely at the discretion of one guy behind home plate, everyone has figured out that MLB has given extremely stern instructions to the umpires to enforce the clock with an iron fist. One spring training game ended in a tie (no extra innings in March!) after a full-count, 2-out, bases-loaded at bat ended with a strikeout from a pitch clock violation.
Do you have any idea how happy this makes me? I literally just paused between paragraphs to rub my hands with glee. We haven’t even started the regular season yet, and there are supercuts of astonished batters & pitchers being just relentlessly screwed with. Others are getting the memo and pitching faster, just to mess with batters. One team notched a full strikeout in just twenty seconds the other day.
One school of thought says that baseball is better when slow, that long at-bats build drama and give you space to discuss the game’s progress. Unfortunately, this goes against the fact that very few people actually like this idea. The mere concept of a slow-paced sport is anathema to a world which glorifies clear start and end times, and which wants to be entertained when they’re in the stadium. Why blame them? You just spent a lot of money & time on going to a game. I have sometimes regaled friends with tales of extra-inning horror, where I’ve been stuck in Wrigley Field until past midnight watching a slow-motion war of attrition until someone puts a ball on Waveland Avenue. They shudder.
Ticket prices seem to be down year-over-year, a sign that owners are so desperate to fill seats as to make moves against inflation. And so you’re paying less money to spend less time watching less baseball. Doesn’t that sound fun? I hope a pitch clock violation ends the World Series this year.