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.

Throw the Ball

I love baseball. Always have, always will. There's no doubt in my mind that it's the greatest game ever. Yet that doesn't mean that I'm blind to its flaws.

Major League Baseball is set to end the seven inning double header games as well as the runner on second rule for extra inning games next year. Good riddance to bad rubbish I say. But the National League is expected adopt the Designated Hitter for the pitchers next year. I don't like that but it's hard to fight the future. Still, I am happy that Shohei Ohtani stuck to his guns as a pitcher in that he wants to bat too. He may be the most complete player in the history of the sport.

What galls me the most though is the pace of the game. In watching old ball games I notice that the pitchers, at least with no one on base, tend to deliver pitches about ten seconds apart. The locally famous Fidrych game on Monday Night Baseball in June 1976 in just under two hours was exciting and compelling and Fidrych THREW THE BALL with a decent pace, a pitch every ten to twelve seconds as I alluded to a minute ago. I know: I began timing, because I was amazed at the pace. These days pitchers stare at the catcher, set, look around, stare at the batter, and finally offer a pitch every twenty seconds or so. And that's if the batter hasn't asked for time, to saunter into his own delays.

Throw. The. ball. Stay in the batter's box. You're either overthinking things or playing a stupid intimidation game of some sort and both stink. Play the game. Throw the ball. That by itself ought to cut half hour off game times, and would be a whole lot more entertaining to boot.