Attention Rob Manfred

What is the problem with baseball? Why does its popularity within American culture seem to be in the balance? Well, baseball’s most glaring issue is pace of play. On average, Major League games this season have taken over three hours to complete. If the games were action packed and filled with non-stop excitement pace of play wouldn’t be an issue. But games aren’t action packed. Often times watching a baseball game is just a tad more exhilarating than watching paint dry. There’s a pitch that’s called a strike. The batter then proceeds to step out of the box, re-adjust his batting gloves and tap his cleats, while the pitcher picks up some dirt and juggles the rosin bag. Then, after roughly thirty seconds the next pitch is thrown and then the process repeats itself. Time and time again…. for three hours! Now we cannot totally transform the game of baseball, but we can surely improve it. Implementing a pitch-clock is an idea that has been tossed around, and while I am a proponent of that idea, I think I have another remedy - one that I have yet to hear discussed - that could bring games closer to the two-hour mark.

My idea is this: unless a ball ends up in the stands from either a home-run or a foul ball, the umpires do not acquiesce to the pitcher’s demands for a new baseball. I have long thought, perhaps subconsciously, that it was ludicrous the amount of baseballs that are wasted in a Major-League game. Every single time that a pitcher throws a slider in the dirt or anytime that there is a ground ball to the shortstop, the game is paused, the ball-boy runs out onto the field and the game is delayed ever so slightly. When this happens seven, eight, nine times per inning it really starts to add unnecessary time to the game. Is it really that vital that every time a ball hits the dirt it must be replaced? I presume, with the implementation of some variation of a pitch-clock as well as prohibiting the replacement of baseballs, that Major League Baseball games would be shortened drastically. By how much? I’m not sure, maybe somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 minutes to an hour, which if you ask fans is all that it would take to keep their attention. While this is not a panacea, it is surely a remedy that would position baseball much better with the up and coming generation of fans.