Which Blue Jays, MLB pitchers will a pitch clock impact the most?

It sure seems like MLB is hell-bent on speeding up the game in 2018, specifically how long it takes pitchers to deliver the ball to the plate.

On Monday, ESPN’s Buster Olney reported that the “foundation” of pace-of-play negotiations that will take place between the league and the players’ association later this winter will centre around a 20-second pitch clock when there are no runners on base.

He wrote:

[blockquote]After informal conversations between MLB and the players’ union in August, some players walked away from those meetings resigned to the idea that, one way or another, a pitch clock would be put in place for 2018. They wondered, however, if the time between pitches might be negotiated to 22 seconds or 24 seconds.

MLB, however, wants the 20-second pitch clock. And whether the union agrees or not, MLB has the power to implement this and other rules for the 2018 season.[/blockquote]

He also added that according data published by Fangraphs, “no starting pitcher who qualified for the ERA title averaged under 20 seconds between pitches in 2017.”

Wow. This could be quite the adjustment for some pitchers next season, especially if 20 seconds is the number they land on.

It also raises some immediate questions.

• Who were the quickest and slowest Blue Jays pitchers in 2017?

• Who were the quickest and slowest pitchers across the majors in 2017?

The answers below are via Fangraphs’ handy ‘pace’ statistic, which they define as:

[blockquote]A measure of the seconds between pitches for both hitters and pitchers based on PITCHf/x timestamps. To calculate the pace for a PA, you take the difference between the first pitch of a PA and the last pitch and then divide by the number of pitches minus one. This essentially captures the average time between the pitches in the plate appearance and the average of these paces constitutes a player’s season Pace.[/blockquote]

Below we have included data for all Blue Jays pitchers with a minimum of 10 innings pitched in 2017. For the league-wide statistics we decided to narrow the search to pitchers with at least 100 innings to better identify players who throw more often, and therefore will potentially be impacted the most.

You can read more about pace here.

2017 Blue Jays pitchers average pace (minimum 10 innings pitched)

Slowest average pace in MLB in 2017 (minimum 100 innings pitched)

Quickest average pace across MLB in 2017 (minimum 100 innings pitched):