So-called baseball traditionalists don’t fully appreciate how they are often defending innovations — and very bad ones. This is especially true of baseball’s culture of delay and inactivity, which not too long ago would have been considered completely intolerable by the players, umpires, and everyone else but slowly — no pun intended! — took over the game the last couple of decades.
The returns aren’t fully in on the changes implemented this year, but early indications are encouraging. From Axios:
Major League Baseball’s new rules — designed to speed the pace of play, and encourage more action — seem to be working through the first week and a half of the season, AP’s Ronald Blum writes:
- Batting average is up 16 points.
- Stolen bases have spiked 30%.
- And here’s the big one: Average game time is down 31 minutes, on track to be the sport’s lowest since 1984 (when it was 2:35). Average time of nine-inning games dropped to 2 hours, 38 minutes this season — from 3:09 in the first 11 days of last year, when the final average was 3:04.
The league-wide batting average is .249, a rise from .233 during a comparable period at the start of last season. Last year’s average rose to .243 by year’s end, the lowest since 1968.
- Right-handed batters have a .253 average, up from .236 at the start of last year. Lefty batting average is .245, up from .228.
Stolen bases have averaged 1.3 per game, up from 1.0. The success rate increased to 79.6% from 74%.
There have been 125 pitch clock violations in 141 games, an average of 0.89 per game.
- Angels two-way star Shohei Ohtani is tied with 15 others for the major league lead with two pitch clock violations — both in the same game, one as a hitter and one as a pitcher.
- The Mets have the most of any team with 10.
If it were up to me, I’d go further and ban all visits to the mound and disallow batter time-outs. And the next big reform baseball needs is the laser strike-zone, which I believe, and hope, is inevitable.
Play ball (at a crisp pace)!