Rob Manfred, commissioner of the Major Baseball League (MBL), stated something alarming that has been reiterated by one of his committee members. It was mentioned in an article on an otherwise interesting topic.
Pace of Game Committee: It is not an objective of ours to achieve a dramatic time reduction right away. Wednesday, March 18, 2015
Radical change is needed and in this case radical also means swift. We generally tend to think that gradual change is best. But often what is needed is a JOLT! You don't stimulate the economy with an extra $10 in people's paycheck starting at some indeterminate time in the future. You don't wake up people with a refreshingly well paced baseball game by SLOWLY changing the mind numbing pace so gradually that people not only do not notice but cannot notice.
2015 opening day games should seem radically different from those that concluded the reign of boredom that too long commissioner Allan Huber "Bud" Selig caused to replace any semblance of the game we once knew. But they won't seem radically different because Selig's bag man replacement Manfred, the A-Rod Slayer, has little stomach for it and not much more imagination than his benefactor Selig. Manfred will be the typical company man even as the company rots.
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Manfred: Statcast greatly expanding in 2015
Groundbreaking technology will be available in all 30 parks
By Matthew Leach MLB.com February 28, 2015
Addressing the annual Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, Manfred discussed a wide range of topics facing the game in a one-on-one conversation with MLB Network's Brian Kenny...
Other topics from Friday's session with the Commissioner:
• Manfred emphasized that recent rule changes to improve pace of play were intended to be evolutionary, rather than anything radical.
"We're not trying to change the game," he said. "It's not like we have a target in terms of timing. We'd just like to take a little of that dead time out of the game."
He also noted that while pace of play and time of game can be similar issues, it's the former, and not the latter, that is the target.
"I think if you improve pace of play, you will see a downward trend in the absolute length of the game as well," Manfred said. "We're not so focused on that, because it is possible that a high-action, lot-of-runs-scored, 3:02 game may be fine from a pace perspective. There's nothing wrong with that game. It's the 1-0 game that goes 3:02 that concerns us."
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Four hours, 46 minutes for eleven innings. That's entertainment? Monday, July 22, 2013
Last night Red Sox 8, Yankees 7 in 11 innings...
It took almost five hours.
I recorded the game and set my DVR for four hours. The recording didn't even include all of the ninth inning.
Pitches thrown:
Yankees 459
Red Sox 452
total 911
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2 games, 2 runs, 2 questions. Sunday, October 13, 2013
1. Could yesterday's two final four tournament games have been more boring?
2. Red Sox, how do you feel about being beaten by a performance enhancing drug (PED) user? ...
Saturday, October 12, 2013, 8:00pm, Fenway Park
Attendance: 38,210, Time of Game: 3:56
Tigers 1, Red Sox 0
Jhonny Peralta was 3 for 4, including 2 doubles and an RBI single in the 6th. More on him below.
Daniel Nava got Boston's only hit, a one out 9th inning single. Winning pitcher Anibal Sanchez started for Detroit and went 6 innings: 116 pitches, 6 BB, 12 SO. Four more relief pitchers. Detroit threw 164 pitches. Losing pitcher Jon Lester went 6.33: 1BB, 4 SO, 109 pitches. Three more Boston pitchers and a total of 158 pitches.
164+158=322 pitches
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Two hours, 36 minutes for the greatest game of all time: Pirates 10, Yankees 9. Tuesday, July 23, 2013
... game seven of the 1960 World Series
Thursday, October 13, 1960
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TWO hour games! Monday, August 18, 2014
Two hours is plenty of time. I've suggested ways to increase the pace and so can you. It's a matter of making the decision and doing it as soon as possible. Don't wait until 2015 when Selig is gone. There's no time to lose. We're killing baseball by letting it continue to devolve into a slow motion bore.
Enforce existing rules, implement new rules, blah, blah, blah.
The most direct approach is to just mandate that games are complete after two hours, which at the current pace would be about the fifth inning...
Two hours and game called! It's over. Ties count. Maybe two pints for a win, one for a tie. Whatever. Just make it end in two hours, like most movies, as if it's supposed to be entertainment, which now baseball is not.
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Bud Selig's legacy: dead time between pitches. Monday, July 22, 2013
Allan Huber "Bud" Selig, commissioner of "baseball" as the main stream media would call him, has done more harm to baseball than any commissioner back to and including Kenesaw Mountain Landis who started commissioning in 1920.
Selig has allowed the time between pitches to increase ... a lot. I cannot prove this, nor document the extent of the increase, but I believe it to be true. That has been the single biggest detriment to baseball of all time.
This dead time, which cannot even generate revenue, slows the pace of the game. Even if players benefited from this extra time, which I do not believe they do, it reduces the entertainment value of a baseball game...
Bud Selig is presiding over the slow death of what was once the great national pastime of the United States of America.
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Time between pitches: what do fans do? Friday, July 12, 2013
During this avoidable void, what do fans do? ...
If we pay attention at all, we must think: get back in the box, get back in the damn box, get back in the ___ing box you ___ing idiot! ...
Oh, wait. The batter has been interrupted by the pitching coach waddling out to the mound for a meeting. ...
Are some fans actually considering the game situation during the 300 breaks in action? Can that possibly take nearly as long as the interruption? The game is pretty simple and does not change much from pitch to pitch. It would seem that a pretty dull mind would be required to submerge one's consciousness in this empty time interval...
Someone enters and asks about the game and we realize that we don't know. The mind has wandered, much like the batter.
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