Speed up the Game

            With the 2015 Major League Baseball season rapidly approaching, there are many questions that are still up in the air. Most of those questions have to do with players and trades to come, but many are wondering about the pace of game and whether or not Major League Baseball should do something to speed it up.

            It’s long overdue, but the MLB, under the direction of new commissioner Rob Manfred, is finally getting serious about speeding up the game, and making it more appealing to my younger generation. Manfred has toyed with the idea in several different interviews on national television, and has even established a page on MLB.com to explain what they’ve done to experiment with speeding the game up.

            I give big props to Manfred for being courageous enough to make this important issue a priority. Manfred takes a risk by doing so because making changes to baseball is never popular with the traditionalists, and as a new commissioner, he didn’t have to put it on the front burner. Fortunately, he realizes that this is incredibly important, and it looks to me like he is ready to do something about it.

            The first thing that the MLB has done is to experiment with changes to the game in the Arizona Fall League (AFL). First, they began enforcing MLB rule 8.04, which says that a pitcher must deliver the ball to the batter within 12 seconds of receiving it when there are no runners on base. They also made it so that when a team wishes to intentionally walk a batter, instead of throwing four pitches out of the zone, the manager of that team just holds up four fingers and the batter is awarded first base. It was also implemented in the AFL that there could only be two minutes and thirty seconds in between innings, that a batter must keep one foot in the box at all times, and that there can be no more than three time outs (mound visits, player conferences, etc.) in an inning.

            The results of these experiments were not as impressive as I would have hoped. The average time of a game only dropped by 10 minutes, from 2 hours 52 minutes last year to 2:42 this fall. This isn’t enough, but if you were to take these changes to the game and implement them in an MLB setting, I think you would see a much more drastic drop in average game time. AFL games simply aren’t as competitive as MLB games, which means there are fewer mound visits, pitching changes, intentional walks, and small-ball.

            The average MLB game took 3 hours and 8 minutes in 2014. That number needs to come down immediately. There are several smaller changes that the MLB could implement that would speed the game up little by little, including limiting the length of a mound visit and making it so that managers couldn’t take forever while stalling to hear if they should request a replay.

            I can’t stress enough how important it is for the MLB to move ahead with some of these ideas. Before I get into why, let me first start by saying that I want nothing but the best for the game of baseball. Even though most traditionalists disagree with me, I believe that these proposed changes won’t hurt the game, but instead help it succeed in the long term. These changes really aren’t that drastic. I don’t want baseball to be reinvented. This is the same game that was played during the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War I and II, and it will remain the same even as we implement these changes and grow the game’s audience as a result.

            Baseball’s World Series has been a fixture on network television for a long time, but in recent years the ratings have plummeted. This is a combination of two things: For one, there is way more on TV than there used to be.

            Secondly, people don’t care about baseball the way that they used to. I always hear stories of teachers putting on the World Series in the middle of the school day, or of kids cutting class to go watch the Fall Classic. Well I can tell you based on first hand experience, that would never happen in this day and age. Not just because it is politically incorrect, but also because the people in my generation simply don’t care about baseball. In fact, most don’t like it, and mock it. Manfred probably isn’t going to turn those people into die hard fans, but he may very well get their family to turn on the World Series, as long as they aren’t committing to a four-hour affair that the game of baseball is right now.

            While this is an unfortunate reality, it’s not unfixable. I truly appreciate what Manfred has been doing in his first few months as commissioner, and I think that he is a good new leader for the MLB. I look forward to hearing more of his ideas as his tenure moves along.