Pros And Cons For New Pace Of Play Rules

Pace of play. This has been a huge issue in Major League Baseball (MLB) in the past few years and there have been several proposals on how to shorten the game length of America’s pastime. These proposals are greatly disagreed on as longtime fans love the length and the pureness of the game. Newer generations of fans want these rules in place in order to get these “boring” games over with so they can get to the places they need to be. The truth is that the new rules that are being proposed disrupt the flow of the game, and players are greatly opposed to the rules. Therefore, new pace of play rules should be limited in order to preserve the integrity of baseball and to keep the players happy.

There are many proposals for new pace of play rules,

With the recent rise in the use saber metrics, teams are finding unique ways to get an advantage on the baseball field. From batting the pitcher in the eighth spot, to adjusting where the team’s best hitter hits, teams are always looking for advantages to win. This can sometimes affect the pace of the game though as in recent years as teams like the Tampa Bay Rays are finding out that if pitchers, wait longer in between pitches, their average velocity improves Dave Sheinin shares the specifics in his article in the Washington Post, “Every extra second a pitcher waits before delivering his pitch, his velocity increases by .02 mph. It doesn't sound like much, but a 10-second delay would lead to an increase of 0.2 mph, and since every full tick of velocity is worth 0.3 runs per nine innings, if a team's entire pitching staff added 10 extra seconds, the resulting mph increase would equate to 10 runs saved per season.” While this practice delays the game, it creates more exciting games and therefore a better fan experience. Ten runs per season may not sound like much, but in a league where one run can decide a game those ten runs could equal ten wins. If a team wins more, they get more fans attending the games which mean more profit for the organization,

People say numbers never lie and most statisticians live by this principle. Saber metrics have taken over the league, whether it be simple or complex. There are always numbers to prove or disprove certain ideas in baseball. Most of the time they are right, so most people are content with their results, especially if there are trials done in the minor leagues. In the case of the pitch clock, there are trials for it, four years in fact, and an expanded amount or writers are including it in their articles, including Steve Melewski in which he posts the average times in both of the Triple-A leagues and all three of the Double-A leagues. In all of these leagues, the average game times have decreased by an average of ten minutes article. In the same article, Melewski discusses numbers the Nationals beat writer Mark Zuckerman crunched, “FanGraphs.com has been tracking the time between pitches since 2008. It [pitch time] was 21.7 seconds that year and was up to 24.3 seconds last season. Zuckerman also computed that a reduction of those 2.6 seconds back to the 2008 average would reduce game times by about 13 minutes.” These numbers bring up a great point that only two and a half seconds can reduce a game time by nearly fifteen minutes. These two seconds could be accounted for through a pitch clock. With this installation of the pitch clock, the average time back to