Ffamous for the fact that its duration is defined by the outs and not by the minutes, baseball would soon implement a major league clock.
The club leaders toldslowed down by experiments with a pitching clock this season in Las Minores. And the participants in the general managers meetings, held this week in the state of South Carolina, have shown in favor of adopting a countdown between each release, in order to speed up the pace of the game.
“The pitching clock has always been something that has interested me,” Seattle’s president of sports operations Jerry DiPoto said Tuesday. “It’s something we’ve slowly implemented over time in baseball, and I think thate has the potential to be something really positive for the pace of play and the action we see on the ground. And that’s what we try to do as an industry. “
In 2021, the pitching clock was tested in the Low-A West league, and helped reduce the average length of a game from nine innings to 2 hours and 41 minutes. When not used, the duration was 3:02 hours on average.
A countdown is performed from 15 seconds without men on the bases and 17 when yes there are runners on the trails. There is a maximum wait of 30 seconds between the end of one batter’s turn and the start of the next. And between each half inning or to change pitchesr, a 2:15 minute break.
The average duration of a nine-inning game in the majors set a record of 3:10:07 hours during the regular season. In the postseason, the average rose to 3:37:13 and in the World Series it grew to 3:37:59.
In 2018, Major League Baseball proposed to the players’ union implementing an 18-second clock when there were no people on the pads and a 20-second clock with runners on base. In March 2019, Las Mayores decided not to install the clocks until 2022, when very soon.
The proposal therefore remains in place, and Major League Baseball has the prerogative to unilaterally adopt the rule changes on the ground if they give the union members one year in advance.