Do umpires even enforce the 12 second rule anymore? If not, get a small box where you press a button when the pitcher gets the ball and vibrates 12 seconds late. Call the “ball”
The Rules in section 8 seem to imply that a quick pitch is before the batter is set, but if a batter steps out of the batters box before delivery is it automatically time? If not, allow each batter 1 time during an at-bat then if he steps out again without asking permission, let the pitcher pitch.
I don’t really care about the length of games. The problem I have with baseball is the season is too damn long, and nothing that happens before the All Star break really matters much. I’d speed up the season rather than the games–maybe let them start around the Fourth of July, with the World Series to end by the first week of October or so.
Totally. Maybe play 2-game series in the regular season instead of 3; that would instantly cut it down to 108 games. Or just dump the unbalanced schedule shit and play 3-game series against every team, and a few extra against your division. 162 games is at least 50 too many. I just stop caring eventually.
That’s interesting because I’m pretty much exactly the opposite. I love the long season, the “we do this every day” attitude. I’d much prefer two leagues with the best regular season record winning the pennant and then straight to the World Series. It’s the short-series, wild-card playoffs that minimizes the regular season, IMO.
As far as the speed of the game I think the best thing would be a combination of not allowing the batter to leave the box without reason (i.e. injury, something in the eye) and enforcing the pitch timer.
Yup. I just don’t understand the “nothing counts before the All Star Game” argument. This isn’t an NBA game - every year there’s at least one race (usually 2) that comes down to the final week.
Of course, the long season lends itself to having very different phases of the year. Late August until the playoffs is a highly-charged atmosphere - but only for the teams still in it. April-June is much more relaxed, but that certainly doesn’t mean they don’t count.
Which means I can only watch/check scores that week, and know everything I need to know about the playoff picture. Nobody cares what happened in the 2nd game of that double header back in June.
Maybe it’s because I’m a football guy. Every game MATTERS, at least until your team has clinched homefield advantage, can no longer improve its playoff seed, or is eliminated from contention. For college ball, substitute bowl game/BCS status for playoffs, and same/same.
Except that you don’t get to a tight race in September if you crapped the bed in April. Because the games count just as much.
True - they’re different creatures, which is what I was getting at with the "different phases/seasons of baseball. A Royals game in April doesn’t mean much - but neither does a Royals game in September. But it has an entirely different feeling. Hope springs eternal (even for us), and there are extremely important things to be watching all season long.
Baseball has had over 150 game seasons for 100 years. That’s not going to change, and shouldnt, based on the nature of a game: the worst team is much more capable of beating the best team in 1 baseball game, compared to other sports. An accurate determination of a division winner needs more than 100 games to be decided. Many believe the season should go back to 154 games, which I think is a good idea, would keep the world series from going to late october/november. But I’m pretty sure the majority of baseball fans want baseball to be played every day, in all the months warm enough to play it.
Exactly Bootis. The long season is part of what baseball is.
It’s not a slow build-up to one big game, an explosion of sound and fury and excitement. It’s a long daily struggle for sustained excellence, battling through the ups and downs inherent in a game where only the very best teams win even 60% of their games. It’s constant companionship during the summer months, always knowing that your team will be on the radio or on the TV (or, I guess, on your iPhone these days) and that if you miss today’s game, well, there will be one tomorrow.
I don’t like that one. If he uses up both throws early, it’s “Olly Olly Oxen Free” on the bases for the rest of the inning. I don’t follow baseball close enough to know who the best base stealers are these days, but if you gave somebody like Ricky Henderson something like that to work with, you may as well just award him an extra base. Not like you’re going to stop him from stealing it anyway.
We’ve sort of got two different discussions going on here:
Whether the games should be sped up, and
Whether the season should be shortened.
As to question 1, games are a little bit quicker than they were a few years back. I hate to point this out for about the millionth time, but the average Major League Baseball game is substantially shorter than the average NFL game, and much shorter than the average Division I college football game, despite those sports have pretty much the same amount of actual minutes of play. But I don’t hear so much blather about how football games should be shorter. Conversely, an NHL game is shorter than either baseball or football and actually has 60 minutes of play, but the NHL continues to be the weak sister in the major sports lineup.
I see no evidence regular season ball games need to be shorter. I do see the argument that the pace should be kept up, and I like Bill James’s suggestions. I would also heatily agree that this bullshit with the World Series never starting until 8:30 EST needs to end, especially on weekends, when the games should be played during the day, but that’s a problem of start time, not the length of the game.
As to the argument that the season should be shorter, it’s been fine for over a century.
Indeed. I just checked the standings, and I see that almost every team has a mixed record even after only 3 or 4 games played. (Only SF has a 3-0 record, and only Houston has 0-3.)
Though I previously stated my distaste for the length of season, I agree that there’s nothing wrong with the length of games.
However, I believe the OP is talking about the speed of the actual gameplay-- the pitcher putzing around on the mound, the batters stepping in and out of the box to mess with their gloves, hat, shoes, bat, etc. after every pitch, conferences on the mound, etc. You know, all that built-in down time where there’s no real action occurring. To that end, I really don’t know what could be done about it. That’s just how the game is played.
Also, to be fair, the average Sox-Yankees game over the past several years has been about 45 minutes longer, on average, than the average game in the rest of MLB. I know I enjoy the (average) 2:55 game a lot more than I enjoy the (Sox-Yanks average) 3:40 game, time-wise.
That said, there’s still no justification for an umpire to be making public remarks like that.
I have to say I much prefer the average Yankees Red Sox game to the average game of random other teams. I guess I’m just not in a hurry when I watch baseball.
I expect the league will agree, and some form of discipline will be imposed. His comments could be said to reflect at least a potential for bias against particular teams, and that ain’t good.
The James suggestion that a batter should not be permitted to step out of the batter’s box without a good reason would fix much of that problem. Batters stepping out after every pitch to fiddle with their equipment is a recent thing; that did not happen 25-30 years ago. Pitchers futzing around on the mound is harder to enforce but to my eyes it’s much less of a problem than batters dicking around with their gloves. Most pitchers like to get the ball back and pitch it again pretty quickly.
If Derek Jeter’s batting gloves have to be adjusted even after he takes a pitch, he needs to get batting gloves that fit properly. There should be a rule prohibiting that nonsense and it should be enforced to the letter.