In trying to speed up the pace and shorten the length of three-plus-hour Major League Baseball games, commissioner Rob Manfred is asking supporters to hold his beer, one goofy idea at a time.
ESPN reported Monday that, with the backing of MLB owners (or with Manfred’s backing of the owners), the league has made another proposal to the players union designed to speed things along: that managers be given no longer than 30 seconds to challenge an umpire’s call using replay review. Including the playoffs, there were 2,467 games played, and 1,531 replay reviews, in 2016. That doesn’t count the time said to be “wasted” by managers declining to challenge, but even so, we’re not talking a lot of instances where there’s much time to be saved. And consider this paradox, as Jayson Stark writes:
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“The current rules say that, in most cases, managers must ‘immediately’ inform umpires if they want to challenge a call. But in reality, there are often long delays as managers often wait for advice from their internal replay assistants before challenging.”
A few things. One: OK, so we’d go from “immediate” (literally zero seconds, or one second, tops, according to the letter of the law that was almost never enforced) to a limit of “30 seconds.” Thirty seconds is at least 29 seconds more than “immediate.” And MLB says this would shave time off replay challenges.
Two: Longer waits do happen, but they seem more the exception than the rule. Stark even writes that the league has no data on how long it takes managers to challenge with replay and, further, the overall time spent on replay decisons dropped in 2016. Emoji shrug! So it’s hard to argue that even though the average game time jumped in 2016, and many of the playoff games took too damn long, the increase had anything to do with replay clogging up the clock.
A week ago, Stark reported other proposals that had been discussed since May, when a competition committee approved them: that intentional walks no longer require the physical delivery of the ball, and that the strike zone would be raised above the knees. A smaller strike zone, forcing pitchers to get the ball higher, would seem to be a harbinger of more home runs, which would not speed up anything except pitching changes. The intentional walk business is laughable. HA! Has anyone actually ever complained that an intentional walk “takes too long”? There are reasons to keep this rule as it is, and little reason to think a change would matter at all in terms of pace or, even more obviously, length. Further, intentional walks have been in decline for years. MLB teams averaged 31 intentional walks in 2016. Come on, Rob. We’ve wasted more time talking about IBBs now than players do executing them during games.
The whopper of proposed dumb rule changes, you might have seen, has to do with starting extra inning games with a runner on second base and no outs. They’re trying it out in the lower minors in 2017. The rules would be similar, although not identical, to international tiebreakers that sports fans in North America might recognize from girls and women’s softball games.
If the reaction of Mets pitcher Noah Syndergaard is indicative of general player support, the league won’t find much help from the union.
Thor thubject. That about says it.
[ESPN]
