Also Jeter’s obnoxious habit of gesturing with his back (left) hand to the umpire, “Wait, I’m not ready yet, hold on, not quite there,” etc. MUST be stopped by the umpire telling him “You’re in the batter’s box, the pitcher may throw anytime” (plus not letting him leave the box without permission).
Piazza also did this. Prima donna assholes.
I didn’t know that. I do hate that shit.
Maybe they should have a “pitch clock,” visible to everyone, and if a pitch isn’t delivered within a certain amount of time it’s a ball.
Batters should definitely have to stay in the box. Their behavior borders on ritualistic and bizarre.
The regular season should be 154 games.
Is it just me, or does it seem like relief pitchers take forever to get ready? Pitching changes have become the TV Timeout of baseball.
IIRC, they’re only allowed up to 8 warm up pitches unless brought in unexpectedly, in which case he’s given as many as the umpire allows.
But they do seem to take their sweet time.
Also…
Football gets played once a week. Fans don’t mind the time commitment because they’re generally off from work and every game is important. An individual baseball game is likely not that important, and if it’s being played on a weekday, the viewers are probably less willing to commit as much time to watching the game. I don’t think MLB games should average more than 2:15-2:25.
I agree.
[ol]
[li]Upon receiving the ball, pitchers have 12 seconds to deliver a pitch to the batter. Failure to do so is a ball.[/li][li]Upon being called up to bat and stepping into the batter’s box, it’s the hitters responsibility to be ready to receive a pitch (provided the pitcher comes to a set position, etc.)[/li][li]After a broken bat or foul ball the clock resumes after the batter has retaken his stance in the batter’s box. [/li][li]Time will not be granted for pitcher catcher meetings unless it is the one pitcher/catcher/coach conference per inning.[/li][/ol]
That’s what “unbalanced schedule” means.
I just caught George Will weighing in on long games on Baseball Tonight (noon edition) and his solution is…to expand the strike zone.
Just wow. I knew the man was differently abled from his newspaper column, but I can’t really fathom that level of idiocy. MLB K’s are up 44% from 1979 to 2008, and he wants to expand the strike zone by about 17%. What a maroon.
I think the best idea I’ve seen (other than having the umps actively move the game along) was Bill James’ suggestion to limit mid-inning pitching changes to one per game unless the pitcher has given up a run in the inning. Doesn’t have much effect on regular season games, but it would sure trim the fat in playoff games.
Devil’s advocate but this may be the same idea as a few years ago about calling the “high strike”. Look at the rules on where the strike zone is and look at what umpires call. They ain’t the same.
It’s six pitches, except in the case of a pitcher having to be replaced due to injury.
The six pitch thing’s been around forever. At least to my honest observation, pitchers are NOT delaying games any more than they used to. Most major league pitchers like to work fast. Games are longer now than they were 30-35 years ago for four reasons:
Because teams score more runs. Obviously, there is a direct correlation between run scoring and time of game. The more batters that reach base, the longer the game takes. That’s why game length is actually down a bit over 5-7 years ago; because offense is down a little. However, even with the recent slight drop, there are many more baserunners and runs scored than there were in the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s.
Because of batters fucking around with their batting gloves and stepping out after every pitch.
Because of a vastly increased number of pitching changes. Never before in the history of baseball have teams changed pitchers so often.
In the case of playoff games, they take longer commercial breaks.
I think of the four reasons, the one you can most easily change with no negative impact to the game is #2. There’s just no reason for batters to spend an interminable time every at bat adjusting their helmets and gloves and what have you. I suspect just changing this would slice five to ten minutes off every game.
If that’s not enough, maybe it’s time to discuss reducing pitching changes, though I think that will eventually change on its own, because the extent to which teams fart around with pitching changes has gone way, way past any perceptible advantage and is actually becoming counterproductive.
Oh, I agree that the umps are missing the top coupla three inches of the zone but they’ve been doing that for 20 years and strike out rates have risen steadily in spite of it.
Think of it another way-if increasing k’s would shorten ball games, why are people complaining about long games in the midst of the highest strikeout era of all time?
I’ll got out on a limb and say the average fan would prefer to see-
Right now scoring is trending toward average and k’s are rising steadily; implementing Will’s suggestion would magnify both trends and we’d have an almost exact repeat of 1963-1968 (but with more k’s) for exactly the same reason-reactionaries trying to fix things that aren’t broken.
Imagine a 4 RPG league where Mark Reynolds and Bronson Arroyo would both have 300 k’s. But the games would be short (in theory) and good thing too-who would want to watch them?
No, it’s eight.
You’re right about the rest, though. 
The problem is, people (and teams) don’t always realize what’s in their best interests, let alone act on it. Sometimes a little push helps.
And since each pitching change is generally treated as a commercial break on TV, which dictates the pace of the game on the field, an inning with an initial pitching change, then with a LOOGY (Lefty One-Out GuY) brought in to get his one key out, then back to a RHP, can take forfuckingever without much of anything happening.
There have been various suggestions about penalizing multiple pitching changes in an inning. The ones I’ve read allow one unpenalized pitching change in an inning, and then gradually step things up, e.g. first batter faced by the third pitcher in the inning starts off with a 1-0 count (unless the pitching change was in the middle of a plate appearance, in which case the batter gets one ball added to his count), the first batter faced by the fourth pitcher starts off with a 2-0 count (middle of a PA: add 2 balls to the count), etc.
I’d be all for such a change, in addition to any rule that penalized batters for multiple delays while the pitcher was on the rubber.
Finally, I don’t think there’s anything that can be done about #4, because people are shortsighted, especially where immediate profits v. the mere prospect of profits many years down the road are concerned. But I do think they’re killing their own fan base by having so many commercials. In a 9-inning game, there are 17 between-half-inning commercial breaks, and going from 1 minute to 2 minutes per break adds 17 minutes to the game, which is a fair amount. (In fairness, I haven’t watched baseball in a few years now, so I have no idea how long the commercial breaks are these days, either regular season or postseason. But long, slow games were a big part of the reason I stopped watching postseason games.)
When I was a more regular baseball fan, I liked both pitching duels and donnybrooks. But a pitching duel, during my formative years as a baseball fan (late 1970s through early 1980s), was over in a little over 2 hours, while anything that went over 3 hours had a shitload of hitting going on.
Basically, the long games had more than enough activity to be interesting, and the pitching duels moved along quickly enough that they didn’t lose you, either. It worked out well either way.
The problem with watching a game of baseball now is that it can take forever without a whole lot of action - the worst of both worlds.
ETA: I know that this sounds like a “everything was better when I was younger” rant, but baseball was definitely better then. As the game’s changed, I’ve voted with my feet, so to speak, and hardly follow the game at all anymore. But I still very deeply miss baseball as it was, which is why I still post to threads like this.
We need to shorten the season and the games. My plan:
1- No getting out of the batter’s box.
2- Cut the break time between innings by 30 seconds. One less commercial, big deal. That would just decrease the supply of commercials and increase their price.
3- No more patriotic seventh inning stretch. If you want to play God Bless America, go ahead but don’t have it AND commercials in the inning break.
4- Cut the interleague play down to two series: one against your cross league rival (if you have one) and one against one other team that changes each year. This will allow for a more balanced league schedule and more 4 game series which will result in the ability to:
5- Make everyone schedule 7 Sunday doubleheaders like they used to play in the old days. You lose 7 games worth of gate receipts but you get the season over a week earlier and you get better weather for the post season.
6- Cut the travel dates in the post season. This will make teams use their fourth starter and some of their dogs in the bullpen, making for a truer test of the whole roster.
I don’t know when you were young, but in the mid-1970s the average game was about twelve minutes shorter than it is now, and that’s with fewer runs being scored than there are today. So in fact, the difference in game length is very, very small.
Of course, if you don’t enjoy it the way you used to, you don’t. It’s your call.
My only complaint about the length of baseball games is the 7:05pm start time. I love going to moderately attended games with a bit of a lazy feel but I’m not going to go to a worknight game when there’s a fair chance that I’ll not be home until after 11.
Returning to an era where I could be pretty confident the game would be over by 9:30 would be a great boon in that regard.
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In poking around I see that the average Japanese professional baseball game is about 20 minutes longer than a US game. I don’t know anything about them to know why that might be.
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Just to set an ideal bar for game length without changing the way the game is actually played, last year the Yankees saw an average of 155 pitches/game. The Red Sox saw 154 for a total of 309 pitches per game.
So just in 12 seconds/pitch that is a minimum of 61 minutes, 48 seconds of time.
To the 61:48 we add:
42:30 for the 17 side changes taking 2:30 each.
Lets say that every time the ball is hit or someone goes from home to first (or farther) it takes and average of 15 seconds to get the ball back to the pitcher (made up number that strikes me as maybe a bit low). The Yankees and Red Sox averaged a combined 92 hits, walks, hit by pitcher, sacrifices, ground balls, and fly falls per game. So that’s another 23 minutes.
Now up to 127 minutes, 18 seconds.
Maybe a 15 second gap between the end of one plate appearance and the start of the next. The Yankees/Red Sox combined to average 79 plate appearances per game. Subtract the 18 that ended a side leaving 61 and another 15:15.
142:18 now.
And now the pitching changes. In 2009 the Yankees has 623 games played by pitchers, the Red Sox 625. Remove the 162 starting pitchers from both and that works out to 5.6 pitching changes per game. If we’re stingy and say a pitching change should take no more than 3 minutes (dammit, they should sprint from the bullpen) then that is another 16:48 per game.
So 159:06 or 2 hours, 39 minutes, 6 seconds (assuming my math is wrong as it likely isn’t when doing this during a conference call) is about the shortest we can expect a Yankees/Red Sox game to be (pick off attempts, foul balls, stolen bases, and legitimate timeouts aren’t included in here) without putting some kind of restriction on strategy used by the coaches.
Kind of surprised that maybe only 30 minutes or so of excisable fluff in a game.
ETA: I know there’s an error in there somewhere since I have more plate appearance outcomes (92) listed than plate appearances (79) but I’m not going to be bothered enough to find it and fix it.
That can be pretty annoying. there was another thread a week ago where we were discussing start times- some teams are experimenting with 6pm starts- AZ in one, and Houston’s opener vs SF was 6pm local (annoying, since it was 4pm here). the Giants do (some) 6pm Saturday games, but I agree it’d be nice to see more.
Most people talk about game length, but that’s not really the problem. Well, combined with late starts it could be a problem. But I think what people really mean, usually, is that it feels like there’s wasted time inside the game. A few moments of action pump up the excitement, which then diffuses as pitcher and batter dick around instead of getting down to business.
I’m with those who suggest new instructions to the umpires: do not grant time to batters after the PA has begun (barring exceptional circumstances). If the batter steps out at any time after the first pitch, let the pitcher go ahead and deliver a strike while the batter is away. They’ll catch on real quick.
That’s the easiest first step. After a year or two with that, we can look again and see if more needs to be done.
The only thing I’d say is that barring a time-out when the pitcher has started his motion would be the easiest first step, practically. Ideally followed soon thereafter by your proposition as a second step. Once in a while, that actually happens, and it’s AWESOME.