Just over 6% of the MLB season has been played, and 2023 as a whole still has 72% of its days remaining, but I’m ready to call it: Baseball’s rule changes are this year’s best innovation in sports.
No, the league isn’t turning players into cartoon characters or cloning Shohei Ohtani so every team can have one of him. By adding a simple pitch clock, and thus reducing the average game time by 31 minutes, America’s pastime has proven you don’t need to go high-tech to be forward looking.
The shorter games mean fans have less time to wait before getting to the exciting moments. Alternatively, blowouts are that much easier to withstand. It’s the rare change that appeals to younger fans hungry for more drama per hour while also returning baseball’s pace to one familiar to its most traditional of diehards.
Yes, the season has just started. The Tampa Bay Rays have yet to lose, and Mets outfielder Tim Locastro has been plunked by three pitches in eight plate appearances, meaning pitchers are hitting nearly .400 against him so far. But the length-of-game impact is not another case of small sample sizes.
In past years, ESPN VP for MLB production Phil Orlins could feel the tail end of Sunday Night Baseball games slowing down. “You don’t have that anymore,” he said. “I prefer (the new pace) as a fan. I even prefer it as a broadcaster, to tell you the truth.” Though that second story is slightly more complicated.
During spring training, Chicago White Sox play-by-play caller Jason Benetti compared calling the new style of action to “waking up in a different hotel room, not knowing where you put your shoes, where the bathroom is, and the light doesn’t work … You’re walking to where you think it is, and you walk directly into a wall.” Not only has the pace changed, but there are additional rules for broadcasters to track, including how often a pitcher or batter can pause play.
And the updates have been even more challenging for analysts, announcers have said, who now have less time to get their takes in.
The response to Hall of Fame broadcaster Tim McCarver’s death at age 81 in February brought the latest proof of how deeply baseball fans connect with the sport’s voices. Maybe uniquely so, given how many games MLB broadcasters call each year and how much of each broadcast is spent with little happening on the field and an announcer left to hold an audience’s attention.
Now, there’s less of that.
Orlins estimated that so-called “discretionary time,” the down moments that have characterized baseball as much as its highlights, has been cut by 25% thanks to the new rules.
At times, that can even affect how broadcasters handle the business side of their craft. “There used to be this almost, like, luxury that if we didn’t do some of the required things that we have to do—promotional announcements, sales items, things of that nature,” Orlins said, “There would be time later in the game. You can’t approach it that way now.”
Baseball producers around the country are also still figuring out how to handle replays—whether to show additional angles after the following pitch, in split-screen with live gameplay, or not at all. But these things will work themselves out. Announcers will adjust just like batters and pitchers have. There’s still plenty of time to play with, after all.
“No one who’s doing soccer with 45 minutes of uninterrupted action is going to feel empathetic that we don’t have time to get things in during a baseball game,” Orlins said.
ESPN has still been able to squeeze in its illuminating in-game interviews with fielders between pitches. On Sunday, Padres third baseman Manny Machado discussed how tough his adjustment to the rules had been, while also decrying the fact that he’d already run out of TV shows to binge during all his newfound evening time.
The NFL seems to tweak a couple rules every year, and the NBA isn’t afraid to tinker either. Changes to its ‘take foul’ penalty and out-of-bounds reviews have both improved basketball fans’ quality of life. But MLB went further than either have in recent years, recognizing that sports can’t hold even their most emblematic elements sacred if they want to compete with today’s constantly updating video games and tools of social distraction.
Hopefully other sports leaders are seeing what a difference a simple change has made. Because now they’re on the clock.
