2:20

Two hours and twenty minutes. That's how long it took for the Detroit Tigers and Minnesota Twins to play their baseball game yesterday. I like it.

I'm a traditionalist. As a rule I prefer things to stay as they are. I'm stubborn. It generally will take you a long time to change my mind if you can change it at all. I love baseball in part because it's timeless. But the time had come to speed up play, and it seems that pitch clocks have done that.

The man on the hill has 15 seconds to deliver a pitch, 20 if there are men on base. The batter must be set to accept a pitch by the 8 second mark. From what I can tell, this sets the pace of game at about where it was forty years ago.

Good. Although one of the draws with baseball has been the game within the game, pitcher versus hitter, attempts at intimidation and control of the one over the other had gotten absurd. All the silliness, staring each other down, adjusting uniforms, stepping off the pitching rubber or out of the batter's box and so on, had reached annoying proportions. I can't tell you how many times that I, a baseball purist, have yelled at my TV, "Throw the ball already!" I had even reached the point of changing the channel, coming back shortly to see if something had actually happened.

It's high time baseball got a move on. I'm glad to see it.