Attention Spans
Pitch clocks. Pitch clocks everywhere…
Well, in Triple-A and Double-A at least.
A lot of people hate the pitch clocks. A lot of people are ambivalent about them. Which is pretty much the way people felt about the All-Star Game meaning something, and that happened. So, Pitch Clocks are going to happen in major league baseball.
You can already see the PR machine working on it. Yesterday, I saw news that, along with the pitch clocks, baseball is trying to speed up games through other methods, including speeding up commercial breaks, which is what many of the pitch clock haters are pointing at as the real culprit of slower games, if they’re even saying that long games are a problem.
Teams already hate that idea, and it makes sense: the money in baseball is from broadcasting agreements, and shortening the commercial breaks (or replays of great inning-ending plays) takes away from the cash cow.
Of course, teams aren’t saying that. Mostly it’s complaining that there won’t be enough time to do those faked kiss cam videos that show someone doing something embarrassing. I’m happy with those, the “Answer is No Proposals” were getting too obvious.
I’m honestly in the ambivalent camp. There are a few pitchers who are egregiously slow, and everyone, including the fielders playing them, hate it. This is coming.
The one thing that all the alternative proposals to a clock lack is this: Umpires have to keep track of and enforce it. Right, because what this game needs is umpires having judgement calls over one more aspect of the game. The one thing about a clock is that it is a pretty clear thing.
We won’t see it for a few years. Baseball will let the clock linger in the minors as younger players get used to it, before Manfred tries to push it through, but it’s coming.
Start the countdown.
