The average Major League Baseball game took 3 hours 2 minutes last season, nearly 30 minutes more than it did in 1981. To look at ways to speed up the game, the league created a pace-of-play committee in September, and now Ken Rosenthal and Jon Paul Morosi of Fox Sports are reporting that MLB will announce three new rule changes on Friday:
● Managers must make instant replay challenges from the dugout, rather than the field. This should eliminate the on-field delays that occurred in 2014 while managers chatted with umpires while waiting for coaches or video coordinators to recommend whether a play should be challenged.
● Hitters must keep one foot in the batter’s box between pitches, unless an established exception occurs. It’s not clear how many exceptions will exist, but during a trial run in the 2014 Arizona Fall League, those conditions included foul balls, foul tips, time being granted by the umpire, and wild pitches.
● Play will resume promptly once television broadcasts return from commercial breaks.
These measures were used at a test location in the Arizona Fall League last year, and games there were 10 minutes shorter on average than the previous year, Rosenthal and Morosi report.
One measure that MLB won’t yet institute is a pitch clock, which also was used in those Arizona Fall League games and will be employed in Class AA and AAA minor league games this season. According to the Associated Press, Arizona Fall League pitchers “had to throw within 12 seconds with no runners on base and within 20 seconds when a base was occupied. There was a maximum of 2:05 between innings and a 2:30 limit for a pitching change.”
The players’ union had to approve any changes.
“It’s important in terms of providing an entertainment product that is consonant with the kind of society in which we live,” new MLB commissioner Rob Manfred told The Post’s Barry Svrluga earlier this month. “There’s a certain flow to the game that I think people appreciate, but we’ve developed some habits where we have down time that we just don’t need.
“Secondly, I think it’s symbolic. People talk about the length of the games, worry about the time of games, and I think it’s important for the institution to be responsive to those concerns and to show, ‘Yes, we hear you.’ Consistent with our history and traditions, we’re trying to be responsive to it.”
After spending the first 17 years of his Post career writing and editing, Matt and the printed paper had an amicable divorce in 2014. He's now blogging and editing for the Early Lead and the Post's other Web-based products.
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