I had a rare disagreement with my high school friends last night. In a group chat, I mentioned that I gave up on Major League Baseball after they introduced a pitch clock into the game. I was a minority of one in the opinion that it was destructive to the game. The rest of the gang thought the clock–and the resulting shorter game times–was a saving grace.
I didn't sleep well. My friends are smart people, and when it comes to sports, they are A students where I just get by with Cs. I spent time wondering if I was just being a crusty old man whose opinion was fixed in a childhood love of the game, and would not bend, even in the face of reason. I finally asked myself: why does a pitch clock bother me so much?
It occurred to me that perhaps it wasn't the clock that bothered me so much as the need for a clock in the first place. The argument goes that the pace of the game is too slow. Non-clock levers had been pulled for several years with little or no effect on the length of the game. The pitch clock almost instantly cut the average time of a baseball game by 24 minutes, taking it back down to the length of games in the early 1980s.
I kept returning to the premise that the pace of the game was too slow. It is in my nature to question things. Two obvious questions came to mind: (1) was the pace of the game really too slow, or was it just a perception issue; (2) why is a slow pace a bad thing?
In 2013, a study by the Wall Street Journal found that a 3+ hour baseball game contains 17 minutes and 58 seconds of action:
The WSJ reached this number by taking the stopwatch to three different games and timing everything that happened. We then categorized the parts of the game that could fairly be considered “action” and averaged the results. The almost 18-minute average included balls in play, runner advancement attempts on stolen bases, wild pitches, pitches (balls, strikes, fouls and balls hit into play), trotting batters (on home runs, walks and hit-by-pitches), pickoff throws and even one fake-pickoff throw. This may be generous. If we'd cut the action definition down to just the time when everyone on the field is running around looking for something to do (balls in play and runner advancement attempts), we'd be down to 5:47.
Using the roughly 18 minute figure, one could say that baseball has an “action rate” of 6 minutes per hour. This pace is too slow for a majority of fans (according to a 2022 Seton Hall Sports Poll). Interestingly, the introduction of the pitch clock reduced the game time by 24 minutes to about 2:36, but did not increase the action in the game. If we calculate the “action rate” in this scenario, we get 6.9 minutes per hour. That's nearly a minute more action per hour over the three hour game! A whole minute!
I think this is where my skepticism kicks in. Am I to understand that an additional minute of action in each hour of a baseball game (from 6 minutes to 7 minutes) is a noticeable phenomenon? Yes, we took 24 minutes out of the overall length of the game, but I simply can't believe that the extra minute per hour adds to the excitement or drama of the game. The game is shorter, but no more exciting.
I can't help but compare this to football. The stats I could find show that in a 190-minute broadcast, an NFL game contains, on average, 11 minutes of action. That is less than the 18 minutes of action for baseball. If we calculate the “action rate” for football we get about 4 minutes of action per hour. Baseball, at 6 minutes per hour has 150% more action per unit than football.
I also had to ask: why did the game get so long? The research I could find surprised me. I would have thought the use of more specialization in pitching (middle relievers) would have extended the length of the game, but the research shows middle relief to have negligible effect on game length. What has had the most effect is the number of pitches per plate appearance, which fits with the strategy of more strikes, more home runs and less balls in play.
It seems to me that the best explanation for this is one that Stephen Jay Gould came up with in his essay “Losing the Edge“, which appeared in Vanity Fair in March 1983, and in which, Gould argued that decreased variability in the game of baseball was why we haven't seen, and will not see again, a .400 hitter. With both pitchers and hitters getting better, the variability between them goes down, forcing down batting averages because pitchers are better–to the point where a .400 season average is virtually impossible.
The specialization that we see today in pitchers, the increased training techniques we see in coaching and hitting, lead to more of a duel at the plate, a kind of arms race, where each is making smaller and smaller improvements against the other until a detente of sorts is reached at a point where pitches per plate appearance have increased. More pitches, means more game time. Compressing the time between those pitches can speed up the game, but not necessarily the action in the game.
And this, perhaps, is where I have my biggest gripe. What I hear is that the game is too slow, that there is not enough action. But the amount of action in a game has not changed with the pitch clock. The “action rate” has gone up by 1 minute per hour, from 6 to 7 minutes per hour, something that I think is virtually impossible for most people to notice. So I have to ask: what value to the game has the pitch clock added? I don't think it has added any value, other than a shorter duration. But a shorter duration is not what fans were asking for. They were asking for a more exciting game.
In this regard, I think the pitch clock struck out.
