Next month, Spring Training will begin for another season of Major League Baseball. Some new faces will appear on certain teams and the farm systems will see who has potential. In the midst of this is something that has caused a rift between both the players and the league. Commissioner Rob Manfred is looking to implement a pitch clock in order to combat length of games.
It's not a surprise that baseball games take forever. Some of last year's World Series took almost or over four hours. One game took over five in a shootout with extra innings. Essentially, here's how it goes. What Manfred is looking at is a 20 second clock to where the pitcher has to throw a pitch. Some sites are also saying one of things is for a batter to be in the box within five seconds left. Warnings are given at first for a violation and future ones will result in either a ball or strike. In an attempt also to cut mound visits, there would be one per inning for each team. A second one would force a team to change pitchers. Whatever proposals there were have been rejected by the players.
Regardless of what happens, Manfred seems poised to implement new change of pace rules this year. I see this as overusing his authority. Really, I don't think the problem is pitchers taking forever. It's not like it takes 10 minutes to throw a pitch. I can't see the mound visit thing working at all. Honestly, I see that part making games longer if you're forcing them to bring in another pitcher. Manfred is going to see a lot of criticism if his plans are to be put in place. Now, the clock has been in use in minor league areas the last few years, but whether that works here is a different story.
An ESPN article from a few days ago discussed players talking more about other aspects such as time between innings and instant replay. I can buy into the replay aspect because it seems like every sport now is taking forever on calls that should be instantly recognized within 30 seconds to a minute, adding into the total time of a game being played. Five minutes may not seem much, but it would certainly make it seem more bloated. Realistically, I don't see MLB cutting down time between innings. If that were the case, it would force teams to cut down on 7th inning stretch activities, especially if it's a team like the Yankees that like to play that overplayed God Bless America song every time on TV in their home stadium. Every league is looking to make more money. Baseball is not going to cut commercial time to get revenue from the same Viagra and beer commercials.
Anyway, I see this pitch clock rule being a failure if implemented. It will just make things worse for teams and cause some teams to lose heartbreakers because they had to change pitchers in the second inning. MLB is lucky to have had a resurgence a little bit due to these last two World Series. They still have a long way to go to win back a lot of old fans and get new ones, and Manfred's ideas right now to make games quicker are going to hurt them.
No comments:
Post a Comment