Major League Baseball teams have reported to their spring training sites either in Arizona or Florida. This means that baseball season is almost here. Major League Baseball is worried about the pace of play. They want to try to make the games shorter in length. This year they are mandating rules to make the game move faster.
Last year, managers would run onto the field and argue with an umpire, trying to figure out if they wanted to challenge a play. Once he did he would walk back to the dugout. This year he must stay in the dugout for the replay challenge. There needs to be something to indicate he wants to challenge. Will they have a sign to specify a challenge or toss a flag like the NFL?
A big change coming is that batters need to keep one foot in the batter’s box at all times. The only time they are allowed to leave the batter’s box is for timeouts, wild pitches, or passed balls. If the batter leaves the box the umpire can call a strike. Not a bad rule to enforce. A lot of batters leave the batter’s box for a sign. They can easily see the base coach with one foot in the box. Assigning a strike for not staying in the box should teach these ballplayers to stay in there at all times.
The television timeouts will be shorter than in years past. After the third out of each half inning, there will be timers. These are located on the outfield scoreboard and near the home plate press box. Each television commercial timeout is going to be 2 minutes and 25 seconds for locally televised games and 2 minutes 45 seconds for national broadcasted games.
These seem to be useful ideas to try to make the game of baseball quicker. If a player violates any of these rules, he will receive a warning or fine. The one area they haven’t addressed is pitching changes or mound visits. That’s where baseball can move really slowly. This adds time to the game with every visit.
How can MLB get the game moving?
I am all in favor of shortening the game and I agree it takes too long to make a pitching change. Why are they ignoring that ?
You are allowed a certain amount of mound visits. The problem is you could 3 or 4 pitching changes per team. That’s a lot. Mount visits could be a simple 30 seconds or a few minutes. Baseball doesn’t seem to realize they need to have a time limit on them.
Don’t worry about length of timeouts or number of trips to the mound. Be concerned about bad calls. Allow greater use of replay. Penalty for lost challenge ….. loss of out!
No limit on number of challenges. This doesn’t strictly answer your question but speeding up the pace of the game is meaningless and amounts to change for the sake of change.
I think you have to put a limit and what you can challenge. Every call could be challenged but if its ball and strikes that would hurt the game. You don’t want that.
I agree with these changes, but even more are needed or I’m going to keep falling asleep during games!
If umpires enforced calling balls and strikes by the written rules the game would speed up, batters would have to hit the ball, and the game would become more entertaining. Instead, no umpire calls the high strike, every pitcher throws low and away, meaning the strike zone is wider than the plate, and the game slows down. All of this crap about timers and replay rules to speed up the game is crap. Just enforce the rules. Too bad no one important will read this, I just discovered this website.
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