Maybe in 2023: ‘Back-to-the-future’
As regular season play nears its end, it’s time to look forward. As they used to say in Brooklyn, “We can’t wait till next year.” (Actually, they said, about their beloved Dodgers, “Wait till next year,” in recognition of the fact that “dem Bums” had once failed to achieve what their talents promised.)
I can’t wait till next year because it looks as though Major League Baseball will make rule changes, including the imposition of a pitch clock, to speed the game up and thereby, presumably, make it more entertaining.
There’s a reason Hollywood doesn’t make three- or four-hour movies: No want would watch them. Who wants to sit in one place for 210 consecutive minutes? This question begs another one: Who CAN sit in one place for 210 consecutive minutes?
The answer – only the hardy, only the foolish, only the truly smitten, only those whose lives are otherwise empty.
A three-plus-hour movie is only marginally entertaining. Likewise, a three-plus-hour baseball game. (The NFL should take notice that football games are lengthening out. The Steelers recently played an exhibition that went on – yikes! – for over four hours.)
In 1941, Joe DiMaggio and the boys spun through an average nine innings in a breath taking 2 hours, 8 minutes. In 1960, nine innings were normally played in a little over two-and-a-half hours.
During the 2015 season, big league baseball games reached the three-hour plateau, and they’ve hovered there ever since.
Last year, games on average lasted 10 minutes longer than three hours. During the current season, games are averaging 3:04.
Beginning this spring, MLB has experimented with a pitch clock in Triple-A baseball, after several years’ use in the lower minors.
The results are singular and striking. Minor league games, which lasted three hours, four minutes, in 2021, are now being played at a turn-back-the-clock 2:38 pace.
Bill Mazeroski and the 1960 world champion Pirates would feel right at home.
“I love it,” Brooklyn Cyclones minor league manager Luis Rivera told Chelsea Jones of the Washington Post in June of the pitch clock. “It cuts out all the downtime.”
Just weeks ago MLB-TV broadcast a Triple-A game. Started at 7, the game was over before 9:30. The pace of play was disconcertingly fast – at first. It had been years since I had seen a professional game played so rapidly.
It wasn’t long before I began to enjoy the pace of the game. No sooner was one pitch thrown that another was on its way to the plate. A double down the right field line was followed in short order by a called strike to the next batter.
One play followed another in such quick succession that there was literally no time for the broadcasters to digress to stories – those time-consuming, irrelevant-to-the-game stories baseball announcers delight (seemingly) in telling.
At least one big league manager – Dave Roberts of the Dodgers – and one star pitcher – the Astros’ Justin Verlander – have voiced concern about a 14-second pitch clock. It’s not the way things are done in the big leagues, they said.
The 11-member committee established to decide such matters must not listen to people like Roberts and Verlander. The game is bigger than any player or manager, regardless of their star power.
Left to their own devices, players and managers will never change the game, except incidentally. Their focus is too narrow. They are concerned with wins and loses, with the here and now. That’s not good enough. Baseball needs an overhaul. Baseball should be entertaining. Three-hour games are not entertaining.
A pitch clock must be imposed.
I recently attended a tight Bucco game at PNC Park. Around the seventh inning, close to the 2:30 mark, enough fans for it to be noticeable were headed toward the exits. That shouldn’t happen, and it wouldn’t if games were played at the pace they were played for most of baseball’s history.
OK, the baseball jabber is over for now, except to say – Pirates, put The Gunner, Bob Prince, and the late, great GM Joe L. Brown in your Hall of Fame. They should have been in the inaugural class.
Also, bring back – as in days of yore – pregame defensive drills – infield and outfield practice. They were pure entertainment for the fans who arrived early to the ballpark. Watching the grounds crew pamper the infield for 20 to 25 minutes just doesn’t make it.
Richard Robbins is the author, most recently, of “Troubled Times: The Struggle for Wages, Recognition, and Power in the Age of Coal and Coke.” He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.