MLB

Commish frets over snail pace

On Sunday, May 14 -- Mother's Day -- the Boston Red Sox and Tampa Bay Rays played a game at Fenway Park that may rank as one of the worst viewing experiences in recent history.

The game, played in blustery, wet conditions, was an 11-2 blowout, the Rays winning, in which nothing much of consequence happened.

Slowing down

• Major-league baseball games, on average, last 30 minutes longer than they did less than 40 years ago.

YEAR;TIME

2017;3:08

2016;3:04

2015;3:00

2014;3:07

2013;3:04

2000;3:01

1990;2:51

1980;2:38

SOURCE Major League Baseball

The most notable occurrence, in fact, was how long it took: 4 hours 32 minutes, the longest nine-inning game in a decade and the third-longest ever.

An NBA playoff game between the San Antonio Spurs and Golden State Warriors in Oakland, Calif., tipped off about two hours later and finished at almost the exact same time.

It was the sort of game that drives Rob Manfred, baseball's commissioner, batty.

"We continue to struggle with time of the game, mound visits, pitchers that don't deliver the ball properly," Manfred told reporters this month at Coors Field in Denver.

Six mid-inning pitching changes, 2 replay reviews and 370 pitches thrown (74 more than in an average game this season) conspired to add unnecessary length to the May 14 game.

Less obvious was uncharted dead time -- catchers' mound visits, batters stepping out of the box, pitchers holding the ball -- that has combined to lengthen the average game time this season to 3:08, eclipsing the 2014 record of 3:07 per game.

Manfred, armed with focus-group and survey data suggesting younger fans are increasingly turned off by the game's glacial pace, has been on a crusade to improve baseball's pace. In February, visibly frustrated, he decried a "lack of cooperation" from the MLB Players Association over pace-of-play issues and implied he could use unilateral powers to impose changes in 2018 if there is no progress in negotiations.

"Anything that makes your game more attractive to your fans is something you should consider doing," said Andy MacPhail, Phillies president of baseball operations. "But change is something our game has a hard time absorbing sometimes. We have to figure out what we can do, without changing the appeal of the sport, to try to have more action."

Baseball has actually gotten even slower this year despite the introduction of the "automatic" intentional walk and a time limit on replay reviews, two well-publicized but chiefly cosmetic changes.

The 3:08 average time is 14 minutes longer than in 2010 and 4 minutes longer than last year.

AL EAST LAGGING

Four of the five teams with the longest average time of game reside in the American League East: the Rays (3:21), Red Sox (3:20), Yankees (3:15) and Orioles (3:13).

That 4:32 game at Fenway Park was unusually long, Boston has already played 11 games longer than 3:45 this season, only four of which went to extra innings. The Rays have also played 11 games of 3:45 or longer, six of which went to extra innings.

There are intractable trends conspiring to add extra minutes to games -- an increasing emphasis on pitch velocity, which leads to more strikeouts, more walks, more home runs and more overall pitches but fewer balls in play.

Baseball's leadership is less concerned with the game's total length than with its pace.

Manfred said he's not concerned about hardcore fans being turned off the slow pace.

"But we're also interested in capturing new fans, particularly young fans," Manfred said, "and we think that a little focus on pace of game, while always respecting the tradition and history of the game, will always help us with the younger group."

The game appears closer than ever to adopting the most substantial measure possible to speed up the game without altering its fundamental nature -- a 20-second pitch clock --- possibly by the start of the 2018 season. Manfred, according to an MLB spokesman, is in negotiations with players union leaders over pace-of-play issues, including the potential adoption of a pitch clock, and could not be interviewed for this story.

But in Denver this month, Manfred explained why pace and not length is the target:

"Time of game is often what happens on the field competitively," he said. "How many runs get scored, how many guys on base, how many times you change pitchers. Those are things I'm not looking to control. Because that's about the competition. That's up to the clubs."

Manfred said pace of game should be the same whether it's a 2-1 game or an 11-10 game.

"And that means batters in the box, the pitchers delivering the ball, avoiding 22 visits to the mound," he said.

TOO MUCH DEAD TIME

The analytics website FanGraphs has been charting "pace" -- a measure of the time between pitches -- since 2007, and this season's average leaguewide pace, 23.8 seconds, is the highest in that span, 2.3 seconds longer between pitches than a decade ago.

So, if there are 296 pitches per game, as there have been this season, an extra 2.3 seconds between each one equals an extra 11 minutes -- of absolutely nothing happening -- per game.

If baseball could reduce its pace to a flat 20 seconds between pitches it could theoretically shave nearly 19 minutes from the average game. Only three of 83 starting pitchers with a qualifying number of innings currently average less than 20 seconds between pitches, led by Cardinals right-hander Carlos Martinez at 19.1. The slowest, Matt Shoemaker of the Angels, takes 26.7.

The reality of Manfred's unilateral powers has left the union leadership, which generally opposes a pitch clock, without much leverage, other than to negotiate the least onerous version it can.

The players have traditionally been more resistant to rules changes than management, especially changes -- such as a pitch clock -- that would affect what they view as their craft. Earlier this year, union chief Tony Clark advocated educating fans about the game's quiet nuances rather than changing the rules to suit those fans' shrinking attention spans.

A pitch clock is "not something the players want to jump on board with, at least not with some specific exceptions," said veteran Braves catcher Tyler Flower, his team's union representative, who declined to reveal what specific exceptions the players may be seeking.

Pitch clocks have been used in the developmental Arizona Fall League since 2014 and in Class AA and AAA since 2015 -- with penalties of a called ball for an offending pitcher or a strike for a hitter. In the first year of a pitch clock in the minors, games were on average 12 minutes shorter than the year before, and minor league games are generally about 15 minutes shorter than MLB games.

Some in the game who oppose a pitch clock in the majors say the problem will resolve itself over time, as a generation of players arrives in the big leagues having already adapted to the clock in the minors.

But Mets General Manager Sandy Alderson said players will revert to stalling if pitch clock is removed.

"The notion once kids are exposed to a 20-second clock, it's with them forever? No, we all revert to a default position," said Alderson, who worked on time-of-game issues as MLB's executive vice president for baseball operations from 1998 to 2005. "Especially with men on base, what happens is, they lose the habit, and we lose continuity from minors to majors."

The increasing reliance on specialized bullpensis another major factor. Teams this year are using an average of 3.1 relief pitchers per game, up from 2.0 in 1990. Alderson suggested requiring each reliever to face two or even three batters before he could be replaced, which he said would not only speed up the game but alter the late-inning dynamics to produce more comebacks.

"We don't have the same frequency of lead changes that we see in other sports, because of the dominance of bullpens these days," Alderson said.

Manfred is wary of altering a fundamental rule of competition. But a limit on mound visits -- primarily from catchers -- could be among the changes he seeks. One suggestion would give teams a predetermined number of such "timeouts" per game but otherwise restrict mound conferences.

"I want the freedom be able to go out there if I need to say something," Nationals catcher Matt Wieters said. "But I've never been one to make three trips in an inning. ... I think it's become a little excessive. It's probably turned into more of a reassurance check."

If a catcher can admit his brethren stroll out to the mound too frequently, perhaps pitchers can someday acknowledge they don't need to hold on to the ball so long between pitches and hitters can find it within themselves to stay in the batter's box at all times.

There is little to suggest such things will happen on their own, and the average baseball game will continue to be about as long as a 3 hour, 11-minute screening of "Gandhi" unless somebody does something.

That somebody, it appears, is Manfred, and that something, inevitably, is a pitch clock.

Sports on 06/19/2017

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