SALT LAKE CITY — In today’s fast-paced world, sports like basketball and soccer —with lots of movement and minimal dead-ball time — have been increasing in popularity, especially with millennials, while baseball has become fewer fans’ sport of choice.
A survey conducted by the Harris Poll found that from 1985 to 2015, the percentage of U.S. adults who said baseball was their favorite sport decreased by 8 percent and ESPN’s TV ratings for 2015 indicated that the average age of fans watching MLB games on TV was 53 years old. A 2014 poll by Lurker on Trends, in partnership with ESPN, found that just 8.1 percent of respondents aged 12-24 said that baseball was their favorite sport.
To rejuvenate interest in baseball among young people, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred had pushed to shorten the length of games and time in between action with pace-of-play initiatives. Despite those efforts, the average time of a Major League game has continued to tick upward. In 2011, the average time of a regular-season MLB game was 2 hours, 56 minutes. So far in 2017, it is 3 hours, 9 minutes — an increase of 13 minutes.
“I understand them trying to speed up the game because you get fans in the crowd getting disinterested at times … when you change pitchers, he faces one guy, and then you change pitchers again,” Salt Lake Bees pitcher Daniel Wright said.
Some of the most radical pace-of-game initiatives have been implemented in the Pacific Coast League (PCL) for a test run before possibly being called up to the big leagues. Here are the four big changes executed in the PCL to quicken the pace of the game.
- A 20-second pitch clock was installed at Smith’s Ballpark and an official rule was entered into the rulebook stating that if a pitcher did not come to the “set” position within 20 seconds, a ball would be called.
- When a batter is in the batter’s box, the player must keep one foot in the box for the entire at-bat, unless he hits a foul ball or calls time.
- In between innings, both teams must be on the field and ready to go in 2 minutes 30 seconds.
- A clock counts down from 2 minutes 30 seconds to zero during pitching changes, with a ball being called if the pitcher is not ready to throw to the first batter.
In 2015, the first year that the pace-of-game initiatives took place, the average time of a regular-season PCL game was 2 hours, 45 minutes — down from 2 hours, 58 minutes the year before. The time gap between MLB games and PCL games has been the starkest in the 2017 season. So far, the average time to play an MLB game is 3 hours, 9 minutes, while the average PCL game is 2 hours, 52 minutes — a difference of 17 minutes.
“The games up there (in the major leagues) are so long, so obviously, this is a testing ground for them (MLB) to see if it can help out,” Bees manager Keith Johnson said. “The games are extremely too long, but a lot of that I believe has to do with TV. Every game is on TV nowadays, there’s a lot of advertising that goes on in between innings.”
Johnson believes that the pitch clock is helping speed games along and is conditioning young pitchers to work faster.
“In the minor league level, if they can get guys to condition them to be a little bit quicker, then hopefully once they get to the major leagues and they start to filter in there that it will help the pace of game up there,” Johnson said.
Wright hasn’t noticed a difference in the way he pitches with the pitch clock in effect.
“I’ve always tried to work fast. I think I do a pretty good job of keeping the defense in the game as far as being fast,” Wright said. “You’ll see a pitcher, every once in a while, that the clock affects a little bit, but I think as a whole, 20 seconds in between pitches is plenty of time for a pitcher to get on the mound, get his sign, and deliver a pitch.”