At some point in the past decade, Major League Baseball became comfortable with itself, which is why this notion of a pitching clock to speed up the game is so half-baked.
It’s such an NFL thing to do; make things so convoluted that you’ll end up needing umpires to be part of the broadcast crew. Seriously: that football fans need Mike Pereira to explain stuff every weekend is not progress, any more than bringing in more lawyers makes a situation better.
Strange thing, this desire to put a clock on the one game that doesn’t have a clock. Because even as baseball has gradually and rather sensibly worked in video replay — a pretty big step for a slow game — it has mostly continued to thumb its nose as its critics.
You see, at some point in the last decade, baseball stopped apologizing for the 1994 players strike and steroids or fretting about declining national television numbers for its jewel events such as the World Series. Commissioner Bud Selig stopped anxiously awaiting each overnight ratings report during the Series and holding impromptu news conferences each day, while the game took solace in the fact that it was doing boffo business as a regional TV sports commodity and new media behemoth, in addition to securing good national contracts even without NFL-level ratings. It watched franchise values boom to the billion-dollar range; it saw small and mid-sized markets win World Series.
Mostly, Major League Baseball realized it was never going to be all things to all people, and decided it could live with its quirks, especially as attendance stabilized. Other sports could go ahead and dumb down; it matter not to baseball.
And now this sop to the attention deficit generation: this season, Double-A and Triple-A games will be played with a pitch clock in effect, the off-shoot of a project conducted in the Arizona Fall League this season. Pitchers were given 12 seconds to throw with no runners on base and had to deliver the ball within 20 seconds when a base was occupied. Time between innings was a maximum of two minutes and five seconds and there was a two-minute, 30-second time limit for pitching changes. Hitters had to leave one foot in the box. There is no indication when, let alone if, similar rules will be instituted in the majors — changes would have to be collectively bargained with the Major League Baseball Players Association — and the minor leagues still don’t know the details of the changes that will be in place in 2015.
Gary Allenson, who will manage the Toronto Blue Jays Triple-A Buffalo Bisons affiliate for a second consecutive season, found out about the new rules in a media report. He is not impressed.
Allenson on The Jeff Blair Show
Allenson, who appeared in 416 games as a major league catcher over a seven-year playing career, said he would rather baseball cut down on the extraneous things not related to the playing of the game, such as (shudder!) walk-up music (“too many guys wait in the on-deck circle until the song starts,”) and replays on video boards. Allenson is skeptical about the logistics of taking something from the Arizona Fall League, where there are few, if any, spectators in the stands — usually just wives, girlfriends and scouts and no videoboard shows or contests between innings –- and applying it in the minors (let alone majors) where there is choreographed between-innings presentations.
Allenson worries about the game’s many grey areas; the places where “you need to use common sense and go from there.” When he caught, Allenson would sometimes ask the home-plate umpire for extra pitches for his pitcher if that pitcher was forced to sit through a long half inning. Will that be allowed? Allenson also noted that the Bisons lost a game last year trying to walk somebody intentionally. The season before, when he managed Double-A New Hampshire, a wild pitch in extra innings cost the New Hampshire Fisher-Cats a win. “So,” Allenson asked acidly, “If I want to walk somebody intentionally, can I tell my pitchers to just wait their 80 seconds to remove the possibility of a wild pitch?”
Philosophically, I’m with Allenson. Cutting down the time between innings and the length of pitching changes is a good thing. Reducing the trips to the mound that can be made by catchers or pitching coaches is a good thing. Eliminating warmup tosses after a reliever has come into the game is fine, unless there is an issue with weather which requires the pitcher getting his footing on the mound, which often differs from the mound in the bullpen. One or two pitches ought to be enough. We do disagree on the issue of batters stepping out of the batting box: Allenson said it’s a necessity for hitters to collect their thoughts. I’d rather that once you’re in the box, one foot stays in at all times unless you’ve been knocked down.
I have not spoken to training staffs or club doctors about whether heightened risk of injury to a pitcher — especially in Double-A — is a concern. But I’m not certain I’d want 20-year-old Johnny Milliondollararm fidgeting in the sixth inning of a close game, knowing that he’s closing in on his pitch count with one eye on the stupid 20-second clock and rushing through a messy delivery. Pop goes the ligament.
Look, a little pruning around the edges of a major league game is acceptable. And it is true that much of the impetus behind this experimentation is keeping broadcast partners happy while laying the groundwork for in-game administration of greater video replay. Replay never speeds up a game — any game — and if you’re going to add time to get it right you’re going to need to subtract time elsewhere. I get that the new commissioner, Rob Manfred, wants to make his mark on the game but my sense is the bigger issues should be solving long-running stadium matters in Tampa and Oakland and figuring out how to prevent baseball from becoming too heavily oriented toward pitching and defence, because for all the wailing about steroids, the fact is it was home runs that brought people back into the stadiums. I don’t remember any baseball fan watching the clock when Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa were going head to head, and I don’t think sticking a clock on the game is going to bring in a generation of new fans.