Nearly two months into the baseball clock era, you sometimes wonder how the sport ever got so slow. Why did we endure stationary traffic on a ride that could have gone much smoother?
“It was Red Sox/Yankees – a lot of people in these parts know that for sure,” Scott Servais, manager of the Seattle Mariners, said with a smile before a game at Boston’s Fenway Park last week. “I mean, it was four hours a night. Just a regular 4-2 game was 3 hours and 40 minutes. It has speeded things up tremendously.”
The game Servais’ team played that night wouldn’t evoke the prose of Angell or Updike. The Mariners pitchers allowed 12 runs and 16 hits, while the Red Sox pitchers walked eight. There were two hit batters, three errors, 10 pitchers and 19 runners on base. Still, it lasted only 2 hours and 57 minutes – faster than the average major league game in any of the last seven seasons.
“The first five innings of a match fly by”, Servais said. “We have two or three hits, they have two or three hits and you look up and it’s the fifth inning and we’re not even at an hour. It gets a little slower from there, but there are nights when I think, ‘We’re going to get this done in an hour and 50 minutes.’”
Indeed, a few days later on ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball” — the stage for so many of those infamous marathons between the Red Sox and Yankees — the Mets and Cleveland Guardians finished in a tidy 2 hours and 6 minutes, the fastest “Sunday Night Baseball” Baseball” game in eight years.
For veteran players, the pitch clock — the most prominent of several Major League Baseball rule changes this season — has required a recalibration of the sport’s familiar rhythms. But the results are impossible to ignore: Through Monday, the average time of a nine-inning game was 2 hours and 37 minutes, which would be the fastest MLB pace since 1984. Last season’s average, over the same number of days, was 3 hours 5 minutes.
The average time of a nine-inning game had never been as high as three hours until 2014. After a slight dip in 2015, it’s been at least three hours since then. Think of MLB as the permissive parent who suddenly became strict. The kids stayed out too late, so now there’s a curfew: 15 seconds with the bases empty, 20 seconds with runners on base.
“If there was a way to deliver the pace without the clock, we would have done it 20 years ago,” said Morgan Sword, MLB’s executive vice president of baseball operations.
“We started Day 1 of Spring Training with rigid enforcement of all these new rules, and we felt that was the best way to get players through that adjustment period and get to the other side,” Sword continued. “And as we saw in the minor leagues, once you’re on the other side, fouls happen in less than half the games and they’re not a huge part of the league – but you feel the advantage of the clock every throw all night.” .”
The rule changes, Sword said, have worked as MLB intended. With larger bases and a cap on pickoff attempts per plate appearance, stolen base attempts are up to 1.8 per game, the highest since 2012, and the 78.7 percent success rate is the highest in history. With a ban on defensive shifts that put more than two infielders on one side of the diamond, the batting average of balls in play is up to .298, up six points from last year — and fielding is back in style .
“You can’t hide the service second baseman anymore,” said Red Sox shortstop Kiké Hernández. “I feel like there were a lot of really offensive second basemen who didn’t necessarily fill their position that well, but they could get away with playing second base because they got hidden in the squad. Now you have to get a bit more athletic again.”
In some ways, the service was like a cheat code. The data showed where a batter was most likely to hit a ball, so defenders positioned themselves accordingly. Without the shift, intuitive infielders with a passion for preparation have an edge.
“I like the distance of how the defense is now; it’s just so pure,” said Seattle’s Kolten Wong, a two-time Gold Glove winner at second base. “You really have to pay attention to pitch calling, batting tendencies, what guys are trying to do in certain situations. It makes the game more interesting.”
Wong, a left-handed hitter, has seen no advantage on an offense; he hits below .200. In general, however, left-handers hit 37 points higher on drawn ground balls and 28 points higher on drawn line drives. Future generations of left-handers may never know the fear of their predecessors.
“It was a nightmare,” said Matt Joyce, a former outfielder who hit .242 in a 14-year career through 2021. “It drove me crazy. The argument for me was, if it hit right-handers the same, okay . But you basically just killed left-handed hitters, which obviously wasn’t fair. They’re definitely being rewarded for good contact now, because there are a lot more holes.”
Joyce is now a television analyst for the Tampa Bay Rays, who thrive on the bases. The Rays had 53 stolen bases through Monday, tied for most with the Pittsburgh Pirates in the MLB
Significantly, the five teams with the lowest payrolls this season – Oakland, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Tampa Bay and Cleveland – are also the five teams with the most steals. Cheaper players tend to be younger and younger players tend to be faster. With a higher chance of success on stolen bases attempts, low-paying teams have yet another weapon.
“Tarrik Brock rules our baserunning and he started texting me as soon as we thought these rules were going to go into effect,” said Pirates Manager Derek Shelton, referring to the team’s first base coach. “It was playing for your staff because we have young, athletic players who have played a little bit within these rules, so they knew what was going on with them. The message from the beginning of spring training was, we’re going to hit the bases run aggressively.”
The Pirates struggled in May, but were still tied with Milwaukee atop the National League Central through Monday. The Rays, meanwhile, were the best team in the majors, although they have lost two of their starting pitchers, left-hander Jeffrey Springs and right-hander Drew Rasmussen, to arm injuries.
The question remains whether the faster pace affects the player’s health.
Speaking generally of the pitch clock — and before Rasmussen’s injury — Rays’ pitching coach, Kyle Snyder, said the fast pace clashed with the modern approach to pitching.
“It’s powerlifting every 15 seconds,” Snyder said. ‘It’s all they’ve got. No one is stopping anything in 2023. It’s a lot more power and less art than before, and now they have less time to recover in between.
Pitchers can reset the clock by coming off the rubber twice per at bat, but only with a runner on base. They have a few other tricks to buy a few seconds here and there, but nothing noticeably changes their mental or physical pace.
“It’s important to slow down the game when you get into trouble, and you don’t really have that chance,” said Boston reliever Richard Bleier. “You can only throw so many balls in the dugout before they just tell you no.”
Chicago White Sox reliever Joe Kelly, a former starter, predicted during spring training that injuries in starters would “shoot up” because their muscles take longer to recover between pitches than the clock allows. That didn’t quite happen, but it could be a matter of perspective.
From spring training through Day 55 of the regular season (Monday), pitchers were placed on the injured list 232 times, compared to 204 last year. On the other hand, spring training was shorter in 2022 due to the lockout – from day 2 of this regular season through day 55, pitcher IL placements have dropped slightly, from 111 to 109.
“The best predictor of injury is past injury, and we have more pitchers on our roster today with significant injury histories than at any time in baseball history, so there’s kind of a snowball effect,” Sword said.
He added: “But also the pitching style that has emerged in recent decades, namely maximum effort, high speed and high spin, is also correlated with injuries. And so combine that together, we certainly experience a little bit of a long-term increase. I don’t think there is strong evidence for a material change this year compared to past years.”
The real impact of the new rules will take years to assess. Will finesse pitching become more popular now that power pitching is harder to execute? Will position players feel stronger as the season progresses if they spend less time on the field? Will the number of visitors – with 6 percent more than last year at the same point – continue to increase with a more attractive product?
We already know this much: a lot of dead time has passed and no one wants it back. Remove the weeds from the garden and the good stuff will have more room to bloom.
“Aside from the pacing of it, the product is just cleaner,” said Howie Rose, the Mets’ radio voice. “Boys are still hitting way too much, pitchers are still walking way too much, guys are still trying to yank the ball out of the park. But since the ball is always thrown, whether it’s in play or not, it just excites your senses. And for me that is really welcome.”