When It Comes to the Pitch Clock, Players and Fans Will Adjust Quickly

This is the story of two games that both took place on the evening of April 27, 2022. In an inland Los Angeles suburb, the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes and Visalia Rawhide took part in an early-season battle under the shadow of the San Bernadino Mountains. The Quakes, a Dodgers affiliate, were on their A-game that night. 2021 fifth-round pick Ben Casparius and 21-year old lefty Benony Robles were dominant in a tandem start, combining to strike out a dozen batters while allowing just three to reach base. Tommy Kahnle faced one batter in a rehab appearance, and the Quakes shut out their opposition. Meanwhile, the Rawhide, a Diamondbacks affiliate, didn’t have the evening they wanted. Their four arms combined to walk nine hitters and the defense behind them didn’t help, committing three errors (including one each by highly ranked prospects Jordan Lawlar and Deyvison De Los Santos). In total, 21 Quakes reached base, and Rancho Cucamonga cruised to an 8-0 victory.

A few hundred miles north at Oracle Park, the A’s and Giants played a crosstown matchup. Fresh off the IL, Chad Pinder took a 2-2 changeup from Sam Long into the left field seats for a homer to lead things off. Then neither team scored for the rest of the game. The Giants’ pitching quickly stabilized, with piggyback man Jakob Junis contributing five scoreless on an efficient 64 pitches, while Paul Blackburn and his bullpen combined to blank San Francisco’s bats. But while this low-scoring affair took three hours to complete (just shy of the nine-inning average of 3:03), Visalia’s comedy of errors and walks was over in just 2:15.

It’s probably clear to most readers what this is all about. Among the new rules introduced to the majors this year is the pitch clock, and as official spring training games kicked off last Friday, viewers were greeted with a surprisingly large new friend on their screens. While MLB has confirmed that the physical clock won’t be visible during regular season games, some broadcasts have added it to their scorebugs, a change that may remain throughout the season:

Games like the one between the Quakes and Rawhide were a familiar sight for me last season. I worked as a motion capture stringer, operating tracking cameras at games from Low-A all the way up to the majors. During that time, I saw some of the ugliest baseball the minors had to offer, including a 21-5 beatdown between the same Rancho Cucamonga and Visalia teams where the pitchers combined to allow 29 free passes. That game was over in 3:23, shorter than more than half of big league games last season. While the shorter inning breaks in the minors were partially responsible for the quicker games, the implementation of the pitch clock in 2022 cut game lengths by 25 minutes without any change in offensive statistics. Now, fans are seeing the timer’s effects at the major league level for the first time. And they didn’t have to wait long to see it substantially affect the outcomes of games.

On Saturday, Braves infield prospect Cal Conley found himself in a situation that every ballplayer dreams of as a child – tie game in the bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, and a 3-2 count. But that day, Conley didn’t go home the hero; he wasn’t even given the chance. Rather, he was assessed an automatic third strike for violating the pitch clock rule – he wasn’t in the box ready to go when the timer had reached eight seconds. An immensely exciting situation fizzled out quite anticlimactically with a 6-6 tie. Other players have been penalized with automatic balls and strikes (albeit in lower leverage situations), including a plate appearance after a mid-inning pitching change where neither the batter nor pitcher was ready, resulting in a 1-1 count before lefty Joe Mantiply had thrown a single pitch.

While most pitchers haven’t yet been penalized for clock violations, watching them pitch over the past few days shows a clear disruption in their pace and rhythm to my eye. Consider Nick Martinez, the pitcher from the Mariners/Padres game that gave viewers their first look at the pitch timer. In 2022, Martinez took 11.7 seconds between pitches with the bases empty, on average – comfortably less than the 15 seconds allowed by the timer. But in his first inning of work against Seattle, he was firing off pitches between six and 10 seconds after getting the ball back from his catcher. Many other pitchers seemed to be rather hurried by the new clock, including Max Scherzer, who completed a three-pitch strikeout in just 28 seconds. It seems that many pitchers sped up due to uncertainty over just how much time they had to throw the ball.

In reality, most hurlers, especially starters, have little to worry about. Last season, out of 83 qualified starting pitchers, just three – Corbin Burnes, Luis Garcia, and Shohei Ohtani – took more than 15 seconds after receiving the ball to throw their next pitch with the bases empty. Some were far faster; almost a third of starters used less than 10 seconds of the clock. Of course, these numbers are averages, and pitchers in the 12-14 second range will definitely need to hurry up some of their slower deliveries, but the vast majority will be largely unaffected. While Martinez’s pace on the mound might have seemed unnaturally fast, Cole Irvin and Logan Webb basically pitched at that pace all season without public complaint.

In my experience watching hours upon hours of minor league games, pitchers consistently adhering to the pitch clock didn’t create a feeling of urgency or rush to the games. Rather, I felt it was successful in reducing many of the notable pauses that occur between pitches, like the pitcher strolling around the mound after each delivery or the batter stepping out to adjust their gloves and take practice swings. Both pitchers and hitters were able to take a natural pause without risking a pitch clock violation. But the timer had its most visible effects with runners on base. While just three starters averaged more than 15 seconds between pitches with the bases empty, nine starters and a whole bunch of relievers liked to take their time when there was the threat of runs scoring, as Jay Jaffe recently noted. While Kenley Jansen, the subject of Jay’s piece, averaged 25.4 seconds between pitches with ducks on the pond, watching prospects take between 15 and 20 seconds significantly sped up games, especially at the lower levels where walks and errors are so common. At the major league level, the advent of PitchCom will certainly speed things up, as pitchers and catchers don’t need to run through multiple sets of signs, and some pitchers will even be calling their own games, reducing the amount of time spent brainstorming before each pitch.

Another place the pitch clock made its presence felt in the minor leagues was in speeding up games that seemed to drag on in low-leverage later innings. Especially at the lower levels where there can be vastly disparate levels of competition, blowouts, even high-scoring ones, ended far more quickly than their major league counterparts. The Rancho Cucamonga Quakes combined to hit or walk a sixth of all batters faced while allowing 129 unearned runs in the 132-game season, but the majority of their games ended in the 2:30 range. Many fans have lamented the artificially quick pace of games in highly tense spots, like the one Conley found himself in last weekend. But those moments – chances to get a go-ahead or walk-off hit – are outnumbered significantly by a losing team throwing out a mop-up reliever in a 7-2 game whose was determined after the third inning. The stakes are of course lower in the California League than the major leagues, but the allotted time was certainly sufficient for all parties there. In fact, out of the more than 50 games I personally tracked last year, I saw just one pitch clock violation, committed by (and I promise this is not a joke) Pedro Báez, who was appearing in a rehab game with the Oklahoma City Dodgers of the Pacific Coast League. In the sample of games I watched, no pitcher who was used to the new rules had any trouble following them.

While a few players have been penalized by the new clock and many pitchers seem to have significantly sped up their pace beyond a necessary level, the effects of the clock are likely to manifest differently during the regular season. The next five weeks of spring training will likely give adequate time for players to adjust to the new rules, ultimately settling in at a pace that allows pitchers to take their time without being assessed automatic balls. When athletes have reflected on the experience of being on the field, many characterize the experience of a high-pressure situation using phrases like “it all goes so fast” or “it felt like slow motion.” Regardless of whether players mentally speed up or slow down as the stakes ramp up, they’re almost certainly not thinking about exactly how long 20 seconds is. But the next month or so will give them time to develop an innate feel for the new rules, and will almost certainly reduce both the number of pitch clock violations and uncomfortably fast-paced innings. In the long-term, the next generation of players will have played their entire college and professional careers under a pitch clock, and will be even more adept at getting the most out of their 15 or 20 seconds between pitches.

It’s also important to note that while the pitch clock reduces the length of games, it won’t have an effect on the amount of baseball-related action. Games have drastically increased in length over the past half century (with a significant majority of that extra time the result of down time between pitches rather than longer commercial breaks), but the number of batters that each team has sent to the plate has remained relatively constant. In other words, while lowering the duration of games isn’t the only goal of the pitch clock, it certainly is a consequence of resolving the pace of play problem. And while this effect will likely be very minor, Jay’s piece pointed out that the timer could result in slightly lower velocity among relievers whose maximum effort deliveries necessitate a longer recovery period between pitches, leading to an increase in balls in play. Some have raised the concern that shorter innings could impact the quality of broadcasts, but it should be noted that sub-three hour games were the norm before the 2010s, during which time baseball was still broadcast on television and radio without issue:

Last summer when I had a week off work, I brought my dad to a Quakes game and got to watch one of the teams I had seen on my computer screen all year in person. My dad didn’t notice the pitch clock during the game, but it did stick out to him that we were home by 10 pm despite a 10-7 final score, a dozen walks, and a late-game comeback by the Inland Empire 66ers that necessitated a bottom of the ninth inning. Of the nine 10-7 major league games last season, eight took at least 3:20 to complete; the Quakes and 66ers wrapped up in 2:53. As players get used to the new rule, I think the importance of the pitch timer will diminish in the minds of fans – after all, even with the new restrictions, the majority of big league history was faster-paced than the 2022 minor league season. News of the changes has been widely publicized with the start of spring training games, from violations to tweets about the length of each game to the clock itself being shown behind the backstop at some stadiums. But players will adjust quickly, just as they did in the minor leagues, and the importance of the pitch clock will fade for fans as it becomes just another part of the game.