The talk of the early part of Spring Training has been the new pitch clock. The debate has been raging. It’s terrible! No, it’s great! Baseball doesn’t need it! Everything can be tweaked to make it better! Rob Manfred hates baseball! Yes he does hate baseball but this is not a good example of that!
Man, this is a tough one. Is the pitch clock good or bad? I mean, sure, we could reserve judgment until we actually see it in action in regular season games so that we actually understand the practical realities instead of just making assumptions, but what fun would that be? And it’s shoddy punditry too. Like I’m gonna let a little thing like “not knowing what I’m talking about” stop me from having an opinion. Get real.
Let’s start off with the pro-pitch clock side. The argument for the pitch clock goes something like this: What the hell is taking so long?
That’s it! It’s really simple! Baseball players spend a ton of time not playing baseball during their baseball games, and that’s dumb as hell, because people are there to watch baseball. Nobody wants to see that sequence where the pitcher gets the sign→batter gets in the box→pitcher comes set→batter calls time→batter steps out of the box→batter readjusts his batting glove and gets back in the box→pitcher gets a new sign→pitcher comes set→pitcher holds the ball→batter calls time→umpire grants time and waves his arms all around and we have to wait even longer for the 2-1 pitch.
That shit suuuuuucks. I’d have had that word go longer but here in California we’re suffering from a crippling U shortage and I don’t want to make things worse than necessary. It’s boring, it’s a waste of time, it adds nothing, and it makes the game drag.
I mean, check this out. It was a 4-3 9-inning game. Took 3 hours and 46 minutes. Or this one. Another 4-3 9-inning game. Clocked in at 3:35. Or this 3-2 game that was also over 3 and a half hours. Or this 4-2 game that was right at 3 and a half hours.
That’s ridiculous, and it’s mostly because it takes too goddamn long to play the game. So the solution: stop taking so goddamn long to play the game, by fiat if necessary. Problem solved. Sure, some purists are going to whine about it, but what’s purer and old-timier than Major League Baseball games not regularly taking 3 hours? Nothing.
There was a time the players policed this kind of thing themselves, you know. Just one more reason that pitchers should be allowed to throw hard objects at the heads of batters at 100 miles per hour. I see no possible downsides here.
So, the counterpoint. The counterpoint is: this is lame as hell.
Yes, it’s just Spring Training, and yes, the players are likely to learn to do better in the majors, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is lame as hell. The whole conceit of baseball is that you determine who’s the best at playing the game by playing the game. When you have a game called on account of bureaucracy, that’s a little hard to take.
Is this going to happen in the regular season? You have to think that it will. There are more than 2,000 regular season MLB games. There will be one of them in which the umpire ends the game without the final at bat actually concluding because either the pitcher (probably not him) or the batter (yes, probably him) takes too long.
It’s just bound to happen. This is a new rule, and so far this spring it’s been enforced more strictly than it was in the minors last year, making it harder to comply. The umpires will probably be slightly more lenient in the regular season — you want players developing the right habits now, and being easy on them won’t do it — but not to the extent of just ignoring the rule.
The end of a game is a high pressure situation. Somebody will screw it up and not get into the box in time because he’s collecting his thoughts. Then there will be thinkpieces and takes about it, and none of it will change the dumb-as-hell fact that a team just lost a game because of a rule that wasn’t a rule a year ago. It’s not really baseball.
But you know what else isn’t baseball? Standing around and not playing baseball for minutes at a time.
So yes, I do think that overall, the pitch clock will be a good thing. But it will also unavoidably lead to some pretty awful results. Which is why I have a proposal:
I want the World Series to end on an automated ball 4. I want a pitcher to have the ball in his hand in a tie game in the bottom of the 9th with 2 outs, the bases loaded, and a 3-2 count. I want him to come set. I want him to hold the ball. Then I want him to hold the ball a little bit longer than he should. Then I want the umpire to call the non-pitch ball 4. I want all the runners to stroll around the bases, and then the season to end.
It will be chaotic. It will be a travesty. It will be hilarious.
There will be a firestorm about this. There will be egg on Rob Manfred’s face. There will be takes — oh God, how there will be takes. These scorching takes will make the regular season hot takes look like offseason lukewarm takes. It will be an absolute catastrophe. This is what I’m in it for.
Because Rob Manfred deserves this. He personally deserves every bit of scorn that can be heaped upon him. He should be a laughingstock. He was hired pretty much solely to be a unionbuster, and he should fail at both that and everything else. He doesn’t care about the sport. He’s a shill for a bunch of billionaires. He should fail. It is right that he fails. And there could be no bigger failure than this.
Yes, it would bring shame upon the sport of baseball and its crown jewel event. But like Thomas Jefferson said, the tree of baseball must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of commissioners. My wish here would be a small price to pay. It would be a small, bizarre, hilarious price to pay, and I think baseball should pay it.