MLB Makes Minor Changes to Speed Up Games, Results Could Be Impactful Down the Line

Thankfully, the baseball offseason is essentially over with pitchers and catchers reporting to Arizona and Florida. This winter it felt, in earnest, like every few days there was another idea floated around by MLB to tweak the rules of the game and instantly turn every kid in America under the age of 25 into Kevin Costner’s character from Field of Dreams. Now, we’re moving to dissecting the body types of each and every player who arrives at Spring Training looking a little heftier or a little slimmer. Joy.

MLB officially adopted some initiatives in an attempt to speed up play, first reported by Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports on Thursday night. The changes aren’t all that radical. The average game in 2014 took 3:02 to complete, will these three reported tweaks chop a few minutes off that total? The major changes include:

• Batters must keep their foot in the batter’s box during at-bats, with these exceptions.
• Timers installed in stadiums so that game action will resume promptly after a 2:25 commercial break for local broadcasts and 2:45 for national broadcasts. Pitchers need to finish their traditional eight warm-up pitches before there are 30 seconds left on the countdown. Batters are encouraged to step into the box with 20 seconds left, with the idea that the pitch is ready to go once the broadcast returns from break. Violations will result in fines, but only after Spring Training and the first month of the season.

The fine print can be read in the press release or in this tweet:

Baseball also made some tweaks to its replay rules, namely that managers can challenge plays from the dugout, which could shave off a few seconds. This seems like a no-brainer and the minute or two it takes a manager to waddle out and ask for a challenge is time nobody is going to miss.

Keeping players in the batter’s box during at-bat? Yes, this theoretically could save a decent amount of time over nine innings. We’ll have to see how well umpires actually enforce it and or if (read: when) players begin to grouse about it. I’d guess few fans watch baseball to see players adjusting their batting gloves after each and every pitch, including recently retired glove-adjuster Derek Jeter. These tweaks won’t radically warp the fabric of the game like installing timed pitch clocks might.

Both pitchers and hitters are going to need to make adjustments and speed up their process between innings, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As it stands, actual action during a baseball game is limited, so taking measure to speed-up play and limit standing around will both pitchers and batters take their time to settle is a positive. Players themselves spend enough time at the ballpark over the 162 game season, so over time they might appreciate these pace change initiatives over time, too.

A few seconds here or there add up. It might not seem like much, but over six months if games take closer to, say, 2:53 to complete on average vs. 3:02 that’s a lot of time shaved away that you can use to do other things with your life and still enjoy following baseball.

If anything, the best aspect of these changes adopted by MLB is that they’re not exactly reinventing the wheel or changing the fabric of the game in a quixotic quest to recapture the past. Often it feels like baseball is a lot like that old episode of The Simpsons where Abe/Grandpa feels like he’s getting old and takes a job at Krusty Burger to feel young again, which doesn’t quite pan out as intended.  How noticeable these changes are, namely if they actually make baseball games feel like they’re moving on at a less glacial pace, remains to be seen.

RELATED: MLB 2015 Over/Unders: Vegas Likes the Nationals and Red Sox; Enigmas in Chicago