MLB’s Pace of Game Changes Are Working
Over the winter, Rob Manfred made it clear that eliminating dead-time between pitches was one of his foremost concerns as Commissioner. The league experimented with a pitch clock during Spring Training, and fines were threatened at players who delayed the game unnecessarily. After the first game of the season, I looked at whether the changes worked on Day 1, and found that indeed, the pace of play was noticeably improved.
But that was based on a sample of 15 games. Often, people will obey new rules for a little while, then go back to doing things the old way. A reduction in time between pitches on Opening Day didn’t mean that we were going to see the same on any other day. But now, we’re nearly at the end of April, and Major League Baseball has played 290 games, so we have roughly 20 times the sample now of the last check-in. This still won’t be definitive, but league averages stabilize very quickly, and structural changes like this usually don’t take too long to show up. So, what’s up with the pace of play in MLB now?
The rules are working. The average time between pitches this year is 22 seconds, down a full second from last year’s mark, and roughly back to where the league was in 2012; if this continues all year, MLB will have managed to reverse three years of ever-slowing baseball in a single season.
Again, one second per pitch isn’t going to sound like a lot, but the sheer quantity of pitches makes these small differences add up. In the games played to date, MLB has seen 83,633 pitches thrown, or an average of 288 pitches per game. Shaving a second per pitch of dead time has translated to a reduction of almost five minutes per game.
MLB’s average time of game is down from 3:07 to 2:58 this year, so the majority of the nine minute reduction has come from shrinking the time between pitches. And they’ve managed to cut off those nine minutes while run scoring is actually up slightly, with total runs per game moving from 8.13 last year to 8.33 this year. The duel goals of increasing offense without extending game length seems like polarizing goals, but it is possible to do both at the same time, and so far this year, MLB is balancing those two priorities nicely.
It’s still only a few weeks of baseball, and this could all still wear off as the year goes along. But the early returns are excellent, and we should give some kudos to MLB for giving us all five minutes of our lives back without materially changing the game on the field. This isn’t mission accomplished, but it’s a pretty encouraging first step in the right direction.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
Absolutely agree, it’s even more noticeable in minor league games. I don’t see a lot of batters sticking to the one foot in the box requirement or pitchers not walking around off the mound but they are moving along. The requirement to make 4 pitches to intentionally walk a batter is another rule that needs to change.
A change to the intentional walk rule sounds great, but then you realize the gifs of pitchers sailing intentional balls over the catchers’ heads would cease to exist. Not worth it.
Kevin Jepsen disagrees.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHoWegKgxxI
Mr. Cabrera disagrees with Mr. Jepsen’s disagreement.
I don’t agree with you on not needing to throw 4 pitches. Not only is that just a fundamental part of the rules, but also wild pitches CAN occur during the IBB. Nixing that would be like being able to trade an out to move the runners up a base instead of having to actually get the bunt down.
Note that if a pitcher goes to his mouth while on the rubber, it is supposed to be called a ball. To intentionally walk a batter, why can’t the pitcher just quickly do that 4 times?
Why are catchers allowed to stop the game in order to have a conversation on the mound in the middle of an at-bat? It happens constantly, and there is no real reason for it. It happened less 10 years ago, and I’m pretty sure it didn’t happen much or happen at all 20 years ago. Why is a mound conference allowed?
You’re wrong about it never happening 20 years ago, but I’m sure it did happen less. It’s up to the umpire to keep the game moving in that case. If a catcher goes to the mound too much, the umpire can break up the conference or even refuse to grant the catcher a dead ball.
I remember some umpires would walk behind the catcher while he jogged out to the mound and when the ump got to where the pitcher was standing he would break it up. Don’t see that happening too much anymore.
Somebody never saw Major League?
Actually, compared to the same point last year, scoring is about even.
Isn’t the real issue that the number of pitches per game is up dramatically, not the time between pitches? There’s only so many seconds to squeeze out of that measure. The only hope for pitches per game is a strike zone adjustment though I’m not at all sure whether that will help or hurt. It may require a sea change in terms of batters trying to reduce strikeouts, which are almost always long at-bats in terms of pitch count.
As an aside on the IBB question, at some point a pitcher who has problems with WP on IBB will take advantage of MLB Rule 8.02(a)(1), which prohibits going to the mouth while on the mound. Then penalty (after a warning) is a ball. So a pitcher can give up an intentional walk without throwing a pitch by standing on the rubber and going to his mouth over and over again. If guys started doing this I think you’d see a rule change to allow a pitch-free IBB.
Dang, Mike beat me to it and I didn’t notice. Sorry….
BR data goes back to 1988 on pitches per game. 1988-89 were around 266 and 2013-14 were around 290. So this would be about 9 minutes…
Comments focused on the total amount of time saved sort of miss the point. The point is the pace of play, not the total length of game. Ask a lot of casual fans which takes longer, an average MLB game or an NFL game, and they’ll insist it’s the MLB game by a lot. I’ve had people try to tell me that MLB games are on average an hour longer than an NFL game, when in fact they’re both roughly around three hours. Of course some MLB games can drag on much longer than that (whereas NFL games rarely due), and people remember that yet somehow don’t remember all the MLB games that are much shorter than 3 hours.
And that’s because MLB games feel longer, especially to casual fans who, raised on football, focus on ball-in-play “action” rather than the subtle dynamics of each pitcher-batter chess match. So for those fans, and for an MLB which wants to capture or keep them, the question is not so much “how long did the game take to play” but “how much play did there seem to be in the time taken” — and increasing the pace of play addresses that even if it only shaves the total length by a few minutes.
What does the data look like if you take out Yankees-Red Sox games? I have to imagine those are a hell of an outlier.