Baseball’s hardline approach to the pitch clock is exactly what it needs to survive

Gather ‘round, kids, and listen to a story about a year called 2011. It was a magical time. There was no TikTok. There was no inflation. There was barely even time itself. Roy Halladay and Cliff Lee were on the mound, and those two worked fast. The Phillies played 27 games in 2½ hours or less that season. For a baseball beat writer, it was like being granted a life-and-a-half. Nobody is more acutely aware of the length of a game than someone who does not have the freedom to turn it off.

It wasn’t until a few years later that I realized just how much of a slog baseball had become. After covering a few NBA games, I began to notice that I was walking out of the press box on the same day I walked in. I could take an actual train up Broad Street instead of a bus. I could get a drink if I wanted to. These were the Sixers, so I usually did.

Say what you will about regular-season basketball, but at least it’s over fast. Adam Silver and the gang know what works. Play some commercials, play some Drake, spend the rest of the time playing basketball.

» READ MORE: Baseball’s attempt to speed up the game has some Phillies feeling rushed: ‘It’s advantage pitchers’

It’s not exactly a novel concept, but baseball finally seems to be catching on. I was skeptical the sport would ever move beyond lip service in its quest to address its pace-of-play problems. Mound visits, three-batter rules, ghost runners — all suggested a hope that the issue could be solved simply by acknowledging it. The introduction of a pitch clock this season was just another gimmick. Except, after two weeks of spring training baseball, it looks like it could end up being a savior.

The early results are nothing short of staggering. On the opening weekend of spring training, the average game time was a mere 2 hours and 38 minutes, down from 3:01 a year earlier. That’s a difference of 23 minutes, a reduction of 12.7%. In the context of a regular-season night game, it’s going to bed at 9:45 versus 10:10.

The secret sauce is enforcement. Without consequences, there are no rules, and without rules there is no order. Two weeks of exhibition play suggest that Major League Baseball is doing what it needs to do to make this rule make a difference.

» READ MORE: Small thoughts about big things: Tender elbows, quarterback contracts, and the Sixers

It probably isn’t fair. Baseball players are creatures of habit, of routine. Telling a pitcher to speed up his routine is like telling Punxsutawney Phil he’s going on a day early. At some point, nurture becomes nature. And things can go haywire when you mess with nature. Zack Wheeler has been among the more vocal pitchers in the Phillies clubhouse in expressing his uneasiness with the new time limit: 15 seconds with the bases empty, 20 seconds with men on, an automatic strike or ball for hitters or pitchers who do not abide.

“I think it messes with the game too much,” said Wheeler, one of several pitchers who have said they felt rushed.

But Wheeler and his brethren are going to have to make do. As uncomfortable as they may be with their leading roles in baseball’s war against time, they are fighting the battle on their own behalf. They need this to work, or the sport itself will be on the clock. Television ratings are down. The last three World Series were the three least-watched in the last 50-plus years. During the 2022 regular season, attendance was down 6% from where it was pre-pandemic.

» READ MORE: Three new MLB rules, and three Phillies who likely will be impacted

The problem isn’t the pace of play itself as much as it is its second-order effects. The most exciting part of a baseball game is its last few innings. The longer a game goes, the fewer people manage to stay up to watch those innings. It simply isn’t good business to condition your audience to catch up on what they missed the morning after.

There will be an adjustment period. Look at Aaron Nola, for instance. Last season, he was one of the slower pitchers in baseball, regardless of situation. But his tempo really dragged with runners on base. In those situations, he ranked 371st out of 399 qualified pitchers, at 26.6 seconds per pitch. Even when you factor in the roughly 6 seconds that will elapse between a pitcher’s release and the start of the next pitch clock, Nola still needs to shave about a second off that tempo.

Is that significant? Maybe not. But it’s also not nothing. Anybody who thinks otherwise is drastically underestimating the muscle memory and biorhythms that professional athletes develop over their lifetimes. Since breaking into the majors in 2015, Nola has thrown 19,280 pitches. Roughly a third of those pitches have come with men on base. On each one of those pitches — the ones measured by Statcast, at least — he has worked at roughly the same tempo: 26.6 seconds with men on base. Now, suddenly, he has 5% less time before each one of his pitches. He’s like a 33-rpm record that needs to reprogram itself to a 45.

That said, athletes also know how to adapt in order to survive. Wheeler and Nola are the generation responsible for getting the sport back to a sustainable pace. Compared to the 27 games they played within 2½ hours in 2011, last year they played six.

The bigger problem lies on the other end of the spectrum. In 2022, the Phillies played 16 games that lasted longer than 3:45, more than twice as many as in 2011. Granted, the pitching was especially good in 2011, but that was only part of the story. In 2008-10, they played a total of 17 games that lasted longer than 3:45.

Baseball is at a point where it need to develop some new habits. That’s true for its pitchers, but also for its audience. People need to be able to expect to watch a full game in the same block of time they’d devote to another form of entertainment. If you watched all 162 games in 2022, you would have spent 21 days, 12 hours and 17 minutes of your life watching baseball. That’s nearly two full days longer than it would have taken you in 2008. In the end, this is one small step for pitchers and hitters, and one giant step for the rest of our productivity.

» READ MORE: How Phillies shortstop Trea Turner has built a rapport with double-play partner Bryson Stott