When Rob Manfred officially took over as MLB commissioner, he went on a bit of a media tour, explaining his plans to better the game of baseball. Among the things discussed were pace of play and possibly banning the defensive shifts. The latter has been discussed on these pages already, so I won’t get into that. But I do want to dive into pace of play for a bit.

One of the proposed changes involves installing a pitch clock. In fact, the Arizona Fall League was used as a bit of a test case already. The idea seems simple enough. The time between every pitch should last no more than 20 seconds. So, taking what we know about pace numbers and applying that restraint, what kind of change can we expect?

Looking at FanGraphs data from 2014 alone, I took the total pitches and pace data from every pitcher (minimum 10 IP). I took a weighted average of the pace numbers, to try and get as accurate of a number as I could (more weight to the time taken by the guys who throw the most pitches).

Here’s what was discovered:

• Weighted average of time between pitches: 23 seconds
• Total pitches logged by PitchF/X in 2014: 704,974
• 2430 major league games
• 290 pitches per game

A 20-second pitch clock means three seconds would be lobbed off of every pitch. That’s 870 seconds saved, or 14.5 minutes, or about 8% of the total game time.

If you wanted to get turbo-aggressive, you could turn to MLB rule 8.04:

When the bases are unoccupied, the pitcher shall deliver the ball to the batter within 12 seconds after he receives the ball.

There are a lot of rules that aren’t really enforced these days, but say the new commish wants to flex his newly-found muscle and implement this rule as well.

• 170,876 total pitches thrown with the bases empty
• 70 pitches per game thrown with no runners on

If pitchers only had 12 seconds to throw in this scenario, it would knock 11 seconds off each pitch. Over 70 pitches, that comes out to 770 seconds or around 13 minutes. Add in the remaining 220 innings at the usual three seconds a piece, and you get … around 14 minutes. All that math to save about 30 seconds.

So 14 minutes seems to be the magic number — a little less than 8% of total game time. But 8% is 8%, and considering a lot of the other percents (rest of the time to play the game, commercial breaks, pitching changes, etc.) probably aren’t going anywhere, 8% is not an insignificant number. There are certainly other factors to consider, but we’re doing this in a bit of a vacuum.

It remains to be seen what steps will be taken, if any, to increase pace of play. But if it’s done using some sort of time restriction on pitchers, we can expect a maximum of 14 minutes or so to be saved, on average. At least now we know. And I have it on good authority that knowing is around 50% of the battle.