Forget, for the moment, that the Tigers’ opened the 2023 season with a wretched three-game losing streak at Tampa Bay. Imagine, instead, balmy days of mid-season, when their home games start at their new weeknight time of 6:40 p.m. under baseball’s brisk, new pace of play.
A Comerica Park game could end in two hours and 14 minutes, the way their season opener did on Thursday; or in 2:48, as the second game did on Saturday; or in 2:10, as the third did on Sunday.
If so, two of them would conclude before 9 p.m. and Detroit fans would head home from a “night” game with the summer sun still setting in the west.
This is but one positive permutation of baseball’s fresh and radical format to pick up its tempo. Despite Detroit’s problematic performance thus far, new rules are blowing through the sport like a cool breeze on a hot day.
The institution of the pitch clock and the banning of the defensive shift were at least a decade overdue, but better late than never.
By boosting the pace of play and expanding offensive opportunities, baseball is charging into the future by restoring the shape and tempo of the past, when hard bat contact was rewarded and nine-inning games rarely lasted three hours and sometimes took only two.
Remember Mark (the Bird) Fidrych, who pitched two-hour complete games while winning 19 for the Tigers in 1976? He threw every eight to 10 seconds. But he was one of a kind. Under new rules, pitchers must deliver in 15 seconds with bases empty or 20 seconds with runners on base.
Batters must reciprocate by facing the pitcher from the batters’ box with at least eight seconds remaining. Taking too much time results in the umpire charging a strike (against the batter) or a ball (against the pitcher). Additionally, a 30-second limit between batters may even cut down on “walk-up music” that pollutes ballpark ambience.
This could be a welcome change from the recent past when batters took their sweet time to stroll to home plate and some pauses between pitches reached 45 or 50 seconds while the pitcher stepped off the pitching rubber and the batter stepped out of the batter’s box and both of them fidgeted and fussed with first this and then that (maybe gold neck chains) and checked the signs and shook off the catcher and spit here and scratched there and fixed their wrist bands and grabbed the resin bag or the pine-tar rag until bored television viewers clicked the remote to see what the hell else was on TV.
Baseball’s speedup is not only to improve the TV audience but also to rebuild live crowds. They are down considerably. In 2007, baseball attendance peaked at 79.6 million. Last season, it was 64.5 million (with COVID a factor). Comerica Park topped out in 2013 at 38,066. Last season, they averaged 19,643.
Part — not all — of the cause was the tedious tempo compared with other eras. According to Baseball Reference, a nine-inning game in 1944 took, on average, one hour and 58 minutes. The two-hour barrier fell for good the following year.
During the Tigers’ most recent World Series championship years, nine-inning MLB games averaged 2:29 (in 1968) and 2:35 (in 1984). But by 2014, the three-hour barrier fell at 3:02. The worst was 3:10 in 2021. The average fell back to 3:03 last season.
Tedium increased in the 21st Century as action dropped and strikeouts grew in part due to defensive shifts that turned old-fashioned hits into well-struck outs thanks to modern metric scouting.
Thus, in another back-to-the-future move, all infielders now must stand within the outer lines of the infield (generally, “on the dirt”) and two must be on each side of second base. Traditionalists might like it because baseball looked like this in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
Other sports have tweaked their rules to survive and thrive. Why not the national pastime?
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This prevents defensive formations that made baseball infielders look like a football secondary or a basketball zone. Perhaps, now, more hitters may spray the ball to all fields instead of hoping to blast it over the shift and over the fence and striking out in the process.
The shift choked the life from the game. As for the pitch clock, traditionalists make a sincere but weak case against it because “baseball time is infinite, because it is (was) the only team sport without a clock.”
Well, cheer up. Without a limit on extra innings, a baseball game — theoretically — still might be eternal. One troubled traditionalist is Alva Noë, professor of philosophy at Berkeley.
In an essay called “Against baseball’s new pitch clock” on the web site The Conversation, the professor also criticized the razzmatazz in modern ball parks.
“Your typical MLB game is drowned out in distracting bright lights, ear-splitting music, sideline games and giveaways,” he wrote. “Roving cameras urge fans to dance for the public or make out with the person next to them . . . No wonder the game seems boring beside all that.”
Approving change is Thomas Boswell, who wrote in the Washington Post:
“Baseball has been saved. By the pitch clock. For decades, I screamed ‘Speed up the game before you kill it!’ Now, I can’t believe what I’m seeing . . . We’re about to witness MLB games at close to the same pace as they were played in the 1950s . . . the 1960s . . . and the 1970s.”
Other sports have tweaked their rules to survive and thrive. Why not the national pastime? Basketball created the shot clock and the three-point field goal. Hockey liberalized its off-side rule to stop the “neutral-zone trap” that turned games to mush.
And it is not accurate to argue that baseball has never changed radically until now. They added a “live ball” in 1920 to spur offense. In the 1960s, they installed artificial turf. In 1969, they lowered the pitching mound from 15 inches to 10 to help batters.
Then came the designated hitter, inter-league play, extensive rounds of playoffs, and video appeals challenging the calls of umpires. These electronic reviews, although time-consuming, have greatly reduced arguments, which also wasted time. Some traditionalists might even miss them.
Still, every half-inning, broadcasters get 2:15 for commercials. This adds up to at least 38 minutes per game, plus extra breaks for pitching changes. Plus commercials before the first pitch.
Oh, and a tip to TV and radio announcers in this new tempo: Trim back those long back-and-forth conversations.
In the new rhythm, try talking directly to your audience instead of to your partner. And “color analysts” must learn to jump in and out with observations directed to the audience, not to the broadcasting partner. Reduce the empty platitudes and happy talk.
After making quick points, let the play-by-play guy call the next pitch and narrate the game directly to the listener, the way Vin Scully and Ernie Harwell did so well back when baseball was so traditional.
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