Start the Clock

Major League Baseball has taken steps to speed up games. But they’re tiny rather insignificant steps. Limiting number of mound visits to six and shaving a few seconds off of commercial breaks. Maybe 4 hour games will be 6 minutes shorter.

The problem is the Players Union. Players, by and large, are creatures of habit. They don’t want to change things, they don’t want to be inconvenienced . So any real measures to speed up the game are blocked.

But you want faster baseball games? Simple. Pick up the damn pace. How do you do that?

Well, first of all, umpires need to call strikes as designated in the rule book. They don’t. They just call the bottom half of the strike zone strikes. If they called more strikes batters wouldn’t take a thousand borderline pitches. They’d swing more. Each at bat would be more like a minute and a half and not five. Multiply that over sixty or seventy at bats a game.

Batters must stay in the batter’s box. No hopping out after every pitch to adjust your batting gloves or go through idiotic rituals. Get in, hit, get out.

No more walk-up music. Players wait the 30 or 40 seconds while their stupid intro music plays. It’s nonsense. Joe DiMaggio didn’t need to hear “Mrs. Robinson” before he could hit.

Limit the number of throws to first base. The runner gets too big a lead? Pitch out.

Institute a time limit between pitches. You don’t have to be exact to the second but there are some pitchers who take forever. Cut that shit out.

Finally, and I know this will never happen, limit the number of pitchers on your roster. Cut down on the number of relief pitchers you have available. Do that and you won’t have ten pitching changes every game. Do that and you won’t have four pitchers in one inning from time to time. Every time there’s a pitching change it’s another four minutes. You’re not destroying the fabric of the game by limiting the number of relief pitchers available. For a hundred years starters either pitched complete games or got late into games and one or two relievers would finish up. Now each side uses six or seven pitchers a game.

Dodger games in Los Angeles in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and into the ‘70s used to start at 8:00 pm not 7:00 pm. And the games STILL ended sooner than they do now. That’s ridiculous. But like I said, nothing is going to really change. God forbid a third-string catcher steps up to the plate without hearing his signature song.

from By Ken Levine