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http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-plan-to-speed-up-baseball-1427996693?mod=WSJ_hp_RightTopStories
The Plan to Speed Up Baseball
The game, its fans aging and ratings dropping, is on a mission
ENLARGE
ILLUSTRATION: JOHN S. DYKES
By
MATTHEW FUTTERMAN
April 2, 2015 1:44 p.m. ET
55 COMMENTS
As the 2015 Major League Baseball season dawns, the lords of baseball are asking for our forgiveness. They want a second chance, and to get it they are making changes that could shake the game to its foundations.
This isn’t about tinkering with the playoffs to make a few extra dollars from the television networks. The 30 team owners have ordered the new commissioner to modernize baseball and make it appeal to an audience that is increasingly weary of the game’s slow pace. There will of course be cries of sacrilege from traditionalists about putting the national pastime on a clock. Many players are resisting, too. But they are unlikely to slow the transformation.
RELATED READING
As baseball season starts, team owners are trying to speed up the game. Will purists get on board or dig in their heels? WSJ's Matthew Futterman discusses. Photo: Getty
National television ratings have plummeted as the average game last season stretched beyond three hours, or more than 30 minutes longer than the average in the 1970s. This is despite the fact that run-scoring, which usually produces longer games, is at a 33-year low.
“What I would like to see is, when you watch the game, that the things you hear fans talk about as wasted time are gone,” Manfred said in a recent interview.
This season will bring clocks that count down a newly specified two minutes 25 seconds between half-innings (2:45 for nationally televised games). A hitter will have to keep a toe in the batter’s box throughout an at-bat, stepping out only after he swings or calls timeout. In recent years, countless batters took to stepping out after every pitch. Baseball operations executives will closely monitor pitching habits, with warnings and fines for the most egregious dawdlers. A too-long-ignored rule says pitchers must throw every 12 seconds. The game’s rulers say it remains a kind of guidepost and they won’t be as stringent as the rule book allows them to be, but they have promised severe measures for excessive violations. In the minor leagues, long an incubator for new rules, a 20-second pitch clock will keep the game moving and train the stars of tomorrow to pick up the pace. Beginning May 1 in Class AA and AAA, the umpire will call a ball if time expires before the pitcher throws.
ENLARGE
The goal is to assure fans that the caretakers of the game are serious about making changes and willing to try almost anything to achieve it. Among other changes baseball is examining: Limiting or even eliminating all those catcher-pitcher mound conferences, making managers change pitchers from the dugout and scaling back the allowable number of warm-up tosses relief pitchers get. Purists can take heart—more drastic measures like a seven-inning game aren’t under consideration, at least not yet.
Picking up the pace has never been more vital. Kids are choosing alternative entertainment. The average age of a postseason viewer is now about 55 years old, and climbing. In the regular season the average age is 57. The average age of an NBA television viewer is 40.
ENLARGE
Baltimore Manager Buck Showalter, here removing a pitcher amid a cluster of infielders, says the scrum isn’t really necessary. PHOTO: JAMIE SQUIRE/GETTY IMAGES
As games have stretched ever-longer, national television ratings are collapsing. An average of 13.8 million viewers watched the seven-game World Series between the Kansas City Royals and the San Francisco Giants last year, 16% less than the last seven-game World Series in 2011, and 44% less than the seven-game series in 1997 between the Cleveland Indians and Florida Marlins, clubs with almost no national following. Just 3.8 million viewers on average watched last season’s National League Championship Series between the Giants and St. Louis Cardinals, two of the game’s marquee franchises.
The lack of offense means there are now three fewer batters in each game compared with 1999, six fewer pitches, and two fewer runs scored. Yet somehow the games are longer than ever, especially in the strategy-heavy playoffs. A dearth of offense, even the ability of hitters to make contact with the baseball, has exacerbated the problem.Teams scored just 4.07 runs a game last season, the lowest average since 1981. Worse, hitters put the ball in play on just 71% of plate appearances last season, compared with 74% 10 years ago. Longer games mean fans are only getting to see something other than the pitcher and catcher playing catch about once every 3½ minutes, compared with every 2:54 a decade ago.
MLB loves to brag about the overall attendance of nearly 74 million last season, partly a product of better ballparks, but executives worry about fans headed for the exits long before the final out. “Our game is really exciting, especially as you get to the late innings and it becomes all about the strategy of trying to get the right matchups,” said Joe Torre,the former player and manager who is now executive vice president of baseball operations and entrusted with implementing the new rules. “We got to get people to the late innings.”
ENLARGE
Ryan Howard, pictured, says stepping out of the batter’s box is a strategy, ‘a cat-and-mouse thing.’ PHOTO: JOE ROBBINS/GETTY IMAGES
Will the changes work? “It’ll be fine until we play Boston, then those games will be four hours no matter what,” said New York Yankees spring training instructor and former managerStump Merrill. Red Sox games averaged 3:17 last season, second only to the Tampa Bay Rays at 3:19. Only the Seattle Mariners—2:59 —checked in under three hours.
Historically, baseball doesn’t change its on-field rules often or lightly. It wears its conservatism with pride, disdaining the NFL for restyling its rules every year. The game celebrates its timelessness and its cerebral nature: Fans can discuss endless possibilities after every pitch.
“It’s a game of strategy, a game you play over and over in your mind even after it’s over,” saidMel Didier, the 87-year-old adviser to the Toronto Blue Jays who began his professional baseball career in 1948.
Ryan Howard, the Philadelphia Phillies slugger who takes a leisurely approach to his at-bats, said the delays are a form of strategy, with pitcher and batter trying to make each other antsy and impatient. “It becomes a cat-and-mouse thing,” he said last week during a spring training batting practice. Howard explained that he likes to step out of the batter’s box and reset himself after he takes a bad swing. Here’s the problem: Howard hit .223 and struck out 190 times last season, which adds up to a lot of bad swings.
Baseball has worried about pace before. MLB official historian John Thorn said rule makers first legislated a 20-second time-limit between pitches in 1901 because of concern that pitchers were falling prey to the “Adonis-of-the-box syndrome,” causing them to gesture to fans, brush back their hair, and play to the ladies in the crowd between every throw. 19th century, the pitcher only had to stay within a pitcher’s box when he threw rather than keeping his foot on the rubber. Jumping Jack Jones used to gyrate wildly, windmilling and waving his arms before each pitch; he retired before the new rule kicked in.
LOUISVILLE SLUGGISH
They Took Their Time
New Commissioner Rob Manfred will try to make unhurried players like these pick up the pace.
ENLARGE
FINE ME, I DON’T CARE David Ortiz, known for an assortment of batting rituals, says ‘I’m not going to change my game.’ PHOTO: BARRY CHIN/THE BOSTON GLOBE/GETTY IMAGES
3:19 Average length of a Tampa Bay Rays game last season
2:59 Average length of a Seattle Mariners game
ENLARGE
Pitcher Chris Archer of the Tampa Bay Rays, the team with the longest games; the Mariners had the shortest. PHOTO: MARK CUNNINGHAM/MLB/GETTY IMAGES
26.7 Seconds between pitches when Yasiel Puig was at the plate last season.
ENLARGE
Yasiel Puig of the Dodgers was tied for third as the most-dawdling batter. Then-teammate Hanley Ramirez, now with the Red Sox, was first, at 28.1 seconds. PHOTO: LISA BLUMENFELD/GETTY IMAGES
26.6 Average seconds between pitches by David Price
ENLARGE
The pokiest pitcher of all last year was David Price of the Tigers. PHOTO: ROB FOLDY/GETTY IMAGES
Small changes to the game can reverberate. Believing that expansion in 1961 had diluted pitching talent and produced Roger Maris’s and Mickey Mantle’s assaults on Babe Ruth’s hallowed home run records, former commissioner Ford Frick expanded the strike zone to help out the pitchers. That led to 1968, when teams scored just 3.4 runs a game. This in turn resulted in lowering the mound the following year to emphasize offense—which eventually helped spawn the use of performance-enhancing drugs and 70-home-run seasons. More recently, there is widespread agreement that cracking down on the use of PEDs and amphetamines has led to the collapse of the offense.
“Baseball is not only self-correcting but delicately balanced,” Thorn said. “Minute changes can have dramatic results.”
Most veterans agree that the easiest way to speed up the game would be to start calling the high strike—the one that passes across the letters—more consistently. Yet many fear that would give the pitchers too great an advantage. “You can talk about expanding the strike zone, but we’re in this offensive drought right now, so how is that going to affect it?” said Torre.
Plenty of baseball lifers, though, welcome changes they say will speed up the game without any ill effects.
Larry Bowa, the longtime Phillies infielder and former manager, said the problems begin withevery player having his own walk-up music for his march to home plate. In his day, Bowa said, if a batter took too long to step in the box or kept stepping out, a pitcher like Bob Gibson orNolan Ryan was liable to create a little music of his own by throwing the ball under his chin.
Now, Bowa said, the pitchers and the hitters are so armed with statistical information that they buy time to overthink every pitch.
“You’ve heard of paralysis by over-analysis?” said Jim Palmer, the Hall of Fame pitcher. “That’s it in action.”
Eddie Perez, the former catcher who is now a coach for the Braves, said there are moments when a catcher has to talk his pitcher off a cliff. Perez once caught an amazing 1 hour 46 minute game thrown by the fast-working Greg Maddux. But at one time in the minors, he was under orders to keep his pitcher calm no matter what. As his pitcher began to lose it Perez strolled out to the mound and started talking about a pretty girl sitting above the dugout. “The next two innings were 1-2-3, 1-2-3—I swear.”
This blurred line between strategy and stalling is what Manfred and Torre must bring into focus.
Torre, even as he serves as pace-of-play police chief, said managers sometimes have to kill time to give a reliever time to warm up. Consider a tiring pitcher in a tight game who falls behind the leadoff hitter 2-0. The inclination is to call the bullpen and get someone throwing. But then the pitcher gets an out, assuaging the need for emergency relief. Then he walks the next batter and the reliever needs to start throwing again. Then another out. Time to sit down. “You can’t do that to a guy,” Torre said.
So instead, a manager signals the third basemen to go talk to the pitcher, then the catcher, then the pitching coach takes a stroll out. Their only purpose is to buy warm-up time in the bullpen.
Phillies manager Ryne Sandberg said rushing pitchers into a game before they are ready would not only give hitters too great an advantage but also put the pitchers at risk of an injury. Rates of serious injuries among pitchers are already epic. Is it worth it to wreck someone’s career just to shave a few minutes off the game?
Players seldom admit that their actions are anything other than strategic. Pitchers, who say they have to control the pace to control the game, blame the hitters for stepping out of the box constantly. Infielders say talking a pitcher through a rough inning goes with the job.
Managers say they need all those visits to the mound to talk strategy or gauge whether their pitchers are spent. “I need to look my pitcher in the eye and see whether he is gassed,” said Sandberg, who also admits to using mound visits to buy warm-up time for the bullpen.
Baltimore Orioles manager Buck Showalter shakes his head at this notion. Any manager who has to stall for time so a reliever can warm up just isn’t thinking ahead. He’d be happy to never walk out to the mound. “I make every pitching change as soon as I hit the top step anyway,” he said.
For now, Torre and Manfred say they are content to begin with their initial changes, experiment in the minors with the more radical shifts and see if that gets the game moving again, without generating those dreaded unintended consequences. “If you go too far, too fast, 2,430 times a year, you’re going to live with that mistake,” Manfred said. “I’d like the fans to say at the end of the year, you know there was a nice briskness to that game. It’s baseball, just a little brisker.”
The Plan to Speed Up Baseball
The game, its fans aging and ratings dropping, is on a mission
ILLUSTRATION: JOHN S. DYKES
By
MATTHEW FUTTERMAN
April 2, 2015 1:44 p.m. ET
55 COMMENTS
As the 2015 Major League Baseball season dawns, the lords of baseball are asking for our forgiveness. They want a second chance, and to get it they are making changes that could shake the game to its foundations.
This isn’t about tinkering with the playoffs to make a few extra dollars from the television networks. The 30 team owners have ordered the new commissioner to modernize baseball and make it appeal to an audience that is increasingly weary of the game’s slow pace. There will of course be cries of sacrilege from traditionalists about putting the national pastime on a clock. Many players are resisting, too. But they are unlikely to slow the transformation.
RELATED READING
- In America’s Pastime, Baseball Players Pass A Lot of Time
- World Series On Track For Lowest Ratings Ever
- Why Kids Aren’t Watching Baseball
- A Q & A With Baseball’s New Commissioner
As baseball season starts, team owners are trying to speed up the game. Will purists get on board or dig in their heels? WSJ's Matthew Futterman discusses. Photo: Getty
National television ratings have plummeted as the average game last season stretched beyond three hours, or more than 30 minutes longer than the average in the 1970s. This is despite the fact that run-scoring, which usually produces longer games, is at a 33-year low.
“What I would like to see is, when you watch the game, that the things you hear fans talk about as wasted time are gone,” Manfred said in a recent interview.
This season will bring clocks that count down a newly specified two minutes 25 seconds between half-innings (2:45 for nationally televised games). A hitter will have to keep a toe in the batter’s box throughout an at-bat, stepping out only after he swings or calls timeout. In recent years, countless batters took to stepping out after every pitch. Baseball operations executives will closely monitor pitching habits, with warnings and fines for the most egregious dawdlers. A too-long-ignored rule says pitchers must throw every 12 seconds. The game’s rulers say it remains a kind of guidepost and they won’t be as stringent as the rule book allows them to be, but they have promised severe measures for excessive violations. In the minor leagues, long an incubator for new rules, a 20-second pitch clock will keep the game moving and train the stars of tomorrow to pick up the pace. Beginning May 1 in Class AA and AAA, the umpire will call a ball if time expires before the pitcher throws.
The goal is to assure fans that the caretakers of the game are serious about making changes and willing to try almost anything to achieve it. Among other changes baseball is examining: Limiting or even eliminating all those catcher-pitcher mound conferences, making managers change pitchers from the dugout and scaling back the allowable number of warm-up tosses relief pitchers get. Purists can take heart—more drastic measures like a seven-inning game aren’t under consideration, at least not yet.
Picking up the pace has never been more vital. Kids are choosing alternative entertainment. The average age of a postseason viewer is now about 55 years old, and climbing. In the regular season the average age is 57. The average age of an NBA television viewer is 40.
Baltimore Manager Buck Showalter, here removing a pitcher amid a cluster of infielders, says the scrum isn’t really necessary. PHOTO: JAMIE SQUIRE/GETTY IMAGES
As games have stretched ever-longer, national television ratings are collapsing. An average of 13.8 million viewers watched the seven-game World Series between the Kansas City Royals and the San Francisco Giants last year, 16% less than the last seven-game World Series in 2011, and 44% less than the seven-game series in 1997 between the Cleveland Indians and Florida Marlins, clubs with almost no national following. Just 3.8 million viewers on average watched last season’s National League Championship Series between the Giants and St. Louis Cardinals, two of the game’s marquee franchises.
The lack of offense means there are now three fewer batters in each game compared with 1999, six fewer pitches, and two fewer runs scored. Yet somehow the games are longer than ever, especially in the strategy-heavy playoffs. A dearth of offense, even the ability of hitters to make contact with the baseball, has exacerbated the problem.Teams scored just 4.07 runs a game last season, the lowest average since 1981. Worse, hitters put the ball in play on just 71% of plate appearances last season, compared with 74% 10 years ago. Longer games mean fans are only getting to see something other than the pitcher and catcher playing catch about once every 3½ minutes, compared with every 2:54 a decade ago.
MLB loves to brag about the overall attendance of nearly 74 million last season, partly a product of better ballparks, but executives worry about fans headed for the exits long before the final out. “Our game is really exciting, especially as you get to the late innings and it becomes all about the strategy of trying to get the right matchups,” said Joe Torre,the former player and manager who is now executive vice president of baseball operations and entrusted with implementing the new rules. “We got to get people to the late innings.”
Ryan Howard, pictured, says stepping out of the batter’s box is a strategy, ‘a cat-and-mouse thing.’ PHOTO: JOE ROBBINS/GETTY IMAGES
Will the changes work? “It’ll be fine until we play Boston, then those games will be four hours no matter what,” said New York Yankees spring training instructor and former managerStump Merrill. Red Sox games averaged 3:17 last season, second only to the Tampa Bay Rays at 3:19. Only the Seattle Mariners—2:59 —checked in under three hours.
Historically, baseball doesn’t change its on-field rules often or lightly. It wears its conservatism with pride, disdaining the NFL for restyling its rules every year. The game celebrates its timelessness and its cerebral nature: Fans can discuss endless possibilities after every pitch.
“It’s a game of strategy, a game you play over and over in your mind even after it’s over,” saidMel Didier, the 87-year-old adviser to the Toronto Blue Jays who began his professional baseball career in 1948.
Ryan Howard, the Philadelphia Phillies slugger who takes a leisurely approach to his at-bats, said the delays are a form of strategy, with pitcher and batter trying to make each other antsy and impatient. “It becomes a cat-and-mouse thing,” he said last week during a spring training batting practice. Howard explained that he likes to step out of the batter’s box and reset himself after he takes a bad swing. Here’s the problem: Howard hit .223 and struck out 190 times last season, which adds up to a lot of bad swings.
Baseball has worried about pace before. MLB official historian John Thorn said rule makers first legislated a 20-second time-limit between pitches in 1901 because of concern that pitchers were falling prey to the “Adonis-of-the-box syndrome,” causing them to gesture to fans, brush back their hair, and play to the ladies in the crowd between every throw. 19th century, the pitcher only had to stay within a pitcher’s box when he threw rather than keeping his foot on the rubber. Jumping Jack Jones used to gyrate wildly, windmilling and waving his arms before each pitch; he retired before the new rule kicked in.
LOUISVILLE SLUGGISH
They Took Their Time
New Commissioner Rob Manfred will try to make unhurried players like these pick up the pace.
FINE ME, I DON’T CARE David Ortiz, known for an assortment of batting rituals, says ‘I’m not going to change my game.’ PHOTO: BARRY CHIN/THE BOSTON GLOBE/GETTY IMAGES
3:19 Average length of a Tampa Bay Rays game last season
2:59 Average length of a Seattle Mariners game
Pitcher Chris Archer of the Tampa Bay Rays, the team with the longest games; the Mariners had the shortest. PHOTO: MARK CUNNINGHAM/MLB/GETTY IMAGES
26.7 Seconds between pitches when Yasiel Puig was at the plate last season.
Yasiel Puig of the Dodgers was tied for third as the most-dawdling batter. Then-teammate Hanley Ramirez, now with the Red Sox, was first, at 28.1 seconds. PHOTO: LISA BLUMENFELD/GETTY IMAGES
26.6 Average seconds between pitches by David Price
The pokiest pitcher of all last year was David Price of the Tigers. PHOTO: ROB FOLDY/GETTY IMAGES
Small changes to the game can reverberate. Believing that expansion in 1961 had diluted pitching talent and produced Roger Maris’s and Mickey Mantle’s assaults on Babe Ruth’s hallowed home run records, former commissioner Ford Frick expanded the strike zone to help out the pitchers. That led to 1968, when teams scored just 3.4 runs a game. This in turn resulted in lowering the mound the following year to emphasize offense—which eventually helped spawn the use of performance-enhancing drugs and 70-home-run seasons. More recently, there is widespread agreement that cracking down on the use of PEDs and amphetamines has led to the collapse of the offense.
“Baseball is not only self-correcting but delicately balanced,” Thorn said. “Minute changes can have dramatic results.”
Most veterans agree that the easiest way to speed up the game would be to start calling the high strike—the one that passes across the letters—more consistently. Yet many fear that would give the pitchers too great an advantage. “You can talk about expanding the strike zone, but we’re in this offensive drought right now, so how is that going to affect it?” said Torre.
Plenty of baseball lifers, though, welcome changes they say will speed up the game without any ill effects.
Larry Bowa, the longtime Phillies infielder and former manager, said the problems begin withevery player having his own walk-up music for his march to home plate. In his day, Bowa said, if a batter took too long to step in the box or kept stepping out, a pitcher like Bob Gibson orNolan Ryan was liable to create a little music of his own by throwing the ball under his chin.
Now, Bowa said, the pitchers and the hitters are so armed with statistical information that they buy time to overthink every pitch.
“You’ve heard of paralysis by over-analysis?” said Jim Palmer, the Hall of Fame pitcher. “That’s it in action.”
Eddie Perez, the former catcher who is now a coach for the Braves, said there are moments when a catcher has to talk his pitcher off a cliff. Perez once caught an amazing 1 hour 46 minute game thrown by the fast-working Greg Maddux. But at one time in the minors, he was under orders to keep his pitcher calm no matter what. As his pitcher began to lose it Perez strolled out to the mound and started talking about a pretty girl sitting above the dugout. “The next two innings were 1-2-3, 1-2-3—I swear.”
This blurred line between strategy and stalling is what Manfred and Torre must bring into focus.
Torre, even as he serves as pace-of-play police chief, said managers sometimes have to kill time to give a reliever time to warm up. Consider a tiring pitcher in a tight game who falls behind the leadoff hitter 2-0. The inclination is to call the bullpen and get someone throwing. But then the pitcher gets an out, assuaging the need for emergency relief. Then he walks the next batter and the reliever needs to start throwing again. Then another out. Time to sit down. “You can’t do that to a guy,” Torre said.
So instead, a manager signals the third basemen to go talk to the pitcher, then the catcher, then the pitching coach takes a stroll out. Their only purpose is to buy warm-up time in the bullpen.
Phillies manager Ryne Sandberg said rushing pitchers into a game before they are ready would not only give hitters too great an advantage but also put the pitchers at risk of an injury. Rates of serious injuries among pitchers are already epic. Is it worth it to wreck someone’s career just to shave a few minutes off the game?
Players seldom admit that their actions are anything other than strategic. Pitchers, who say they have to control the pace to control the game, blame the hitters for stepping out of the box constantly. Infielders say talking a pitcher through a rough inning goes with the job.
Managers say they need all those visits to the mound to talk strategy or gauge whether their pitchers are spent. “I need to look my pitcher in the eye and see whether he is gassed,” said Sandberg, who also admits to using mound visits to buy warm-up time for the bullpen.
Baltimore Orioles manager Buck Showalter shakes his head at this notion. Any manager who has to stall for time so a reliever can warm up just isn’t thinking ahead. He’d be happy to never walk out to the mound. “I make every pitching change as soon as I hit the top step anyway,” he said.
For now, Torre and Manfred say they are content to begin with their initial changes, experiment in the minors with the more radical shifts and see if that gets the game moving again, without generating those dreaded unintended consequences. “If you go too far, too fast, 2,430 times a year, you’re going to live with that mistake,” Manfred said. “I’d like the fans to say at the end of the year, you know there was a nice briskness to that game. It’s baseball, just a little brisker.”
