Pace of Play Under Review in 2015

Much is being reported about the pace of play within Major League Baseball with Bud Selig’s committee on the matter presenting their proposed changes at the owners meetings this week. Owners and league officials are insistent that the game is moving too slow and is, ultimately, costing them the young audience that basketball and football enjoy.

There are talks of implementing 20 second play clocks at the minor league level, changing the rules on pitcher/catcher conferences, limiting batter movement and time outs and allowing an intentional walk to be called from the dugout, forgoing the four pitches currently required.

Of course, a 20 second clock actually contradicts rule 8.04 which stipulates that a pitcher has 12 seconds to make the pitch or face an automatic ball call, pitcher/catcher conferences are a fairly minimal occurrence in 90% of games, time outs and box movement are a strategic way of throwing off a pitchers timing (whether it works or not), and if we forgo the four pitches for an IBB, why don’t we also forgo the lap around the bases for a home run?

These solutions are silly and do little to address a problem that is, seemingly, inconsequential to the fans in the seats. In fact, Buck Showalter told ESPN, “there are only two groups of people I hear consistently complain about the pace of games, and that’s the umpires and the media, people who are at the game 162 times a year. But that family of four in the stands, those people who come to three games a year, I don’t hear them complaining about the length or the pace of games. So what’s the endgame we’re trying to get to? … What are we basing this on?”

You have a point, Buck.

In fact, I took a survey of those who follow me on Facebook and Twitter and not one person said they were bothered by the pace of a baseball game. Part of that may be because we’re A’s fans and the Oakland Athletics rank tenth in fastest game time average but I think the larger picture is that fans don’t really care.

In my life time the average game has increased 29 minutes. In that 29 minutes, a fan could eat three more hot dogs, drink two more beers and win one more dot race. It is, after all, a game. Has this near half hour all been caused by pitchers taking too long to pitch and batters taking too long adjusting their gloves compulsively? Nope. You want to know where the problem lies? Commercials.

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In the same time period analyzed (my lifetime), commercial breaks have increased considerably, now accounting for almost a third of all television time. When I was born, the number was closer to 18%. That amounts to an extra 4.4 minutes per half hour which means that the actual pace of game play has only increased by seven minutes with the other 22 allotted for ads for Frontier Ford and whatever that ad is from Maaaaanteca!

Baseball isn’t about to shave commercial breaks though because that’s the main source of their record revenues.

Baseball claims that it is the pace of play that makes it tough to attract young fans. If you believe that to be true, I’d like to sell you some moon rocks. Take football, which has no problem attracting younger fans. A football game has a 60 minute clock and a 15 minute half time break. That 75 minutes takes, roughly, three hours to broadcast. In that three hours there is approximately 11 minutes of actual play. I’m not making this up, guys. Grab a stopwatch.

How does football attract young fans despite only having 11 minutes of action spread out over three hours? It’s once a week. As long as baseball continues to compare itself to football, they will be on the losing side. If football teams played 162 games a year, nobody would watch it.

If baseball teams want to attract younger fans they should take a page from the books of the A’s and the Giants who have a very large fan base under 30. If the games are fun, the teams have personality, the giveaways are cool, and the ticket prices are family friendly, kids will come.

Baseball is the most social sport we have. Part of attracting young fans lies in the pace of play that MLB is trying to fix. When a dad takes his kid to the park, it is the pace of play that allows dad to answer questions like why does the batter walk around, what’s an infield fly, and why is the catcher standing behind the batter. It is the pace of play that allows two friends in the bleachers to debate each other on the merits of swapping pitchers for a particular batter.

We have all heard of the “romance of baseball” and that romance is born out of those long at bats. That’s where the energy is born.

The French composer, Claude Debussy once said that “music is the silence between the notes” meaning that the power and emotion of music was born where there was no sound. Baseball is the same way and all of these fixes for pace of play address a problem that doesn’t exist except to people who don’t really matter.

Baseball is the anticipation between the pitches.