Week 2- Time in Baseball

The importance of time in baseball is often overlooked do to the lack of a clock of any type. We can see baseball games, such as the 18 inning world series game in 2018, go on for several hours so from the perspective of a fan, time seems to not effect the game at all. However, from the view of a player, time is involved in everything they do. The pitcher needs a set amount of time to go through his routine before every pitch just as a hitter needs a certain amount of time to get from base to base. Over recent years, complaints have rose from fans about the game of baseball being too slow. The article "Play Ball and Do it Faster" by Adam Sobsey touches on these complaints, using statistics and graphs to show how the time per pitch and time per game has increased during recent years. While these statistics are true, the graphs were misleading. The intervals were very small and the graphs made the changes look a lot more significant than they actually are. In the latter half of the article, Sobsey discusses the possibility of adding a clock for each pitch. This was a change that was tried out in the minors and was proven to mess with the pitchers mental. Every pitcher has his routine he goes through before every pitch. As alluded to in "The Secret Life of Pitchers" by Will Leitch, pitching is more psychological than physical. Speeding up the game can completely change the way its played, however, this leads to an interesting point. Baseball viewership has been on a decline over the past decade. Fans call it slow but the real issue may be that it's boring. Not many average fans enjoy watching a baseball game where just a few runs are scored so could giving the pitchers a clock result in a more interesting game? When watching baseball, fans are less concerned with the time the game is taking if there are a lot of runs being scored. So although adding a clock is proven to throw off a pitchers mental, is that what baseball needs to make the game more fun to watch? Giving a pitcher less time to read the batter could hopefully result in more hits. Obviously this idea would need to be tested more but preferably not in the minor leagues. This change in baseball would be for the entertainment of the fans and trying it out if they tried the pitching clock again in the minor leagues, we could not get a very big sample size from fans. Time in baseball has always been important and with average attention span lessening every year, it is becoming relevant to fans. In order to regain viewership from younger audiences, the MLB must do something, maybe even adding a pitching clock.