2023 MLB Thread; Say Hey, everybody: Rest In Power, Willie

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Going to bed early tonight so I can go into my office early and leave early. Normally my wife or my mom picks up G from school but I'm going to surprise her early tomorrow bc it's opening day. Judge, her favorite play by a million miles, is playing his first game as captain and I think that's something we should watch together. I think I posted this before, but it's one of my favorite videos of her. It explains why we'll watch the game together tomorrow. Going to grill some hot dogs and have some popcorn too. Sometimes I wonder how I'm doing as a parent, but then I watch this and I just smile.

 
dblplay1212 said:
Going to bed early tonight so I can go into my office early and leave early. Normally my wife or my mom picks up G from school but I'm going to surprise her early tomorrow bc it's opening day. Judge, her favorite play by a million miles, is playing his first game as captain and I think that's something we should watch together. I think I posted this before, but it's one of my favorite videos of her. It explains why we'll watch the game together tomorrow. Going to grill some hot dogs and have some popcorn too. Sometimes I wonder how I'm doing as a parent, but then I watch this and I just smile.

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I’m sure you are doing great man - believe in yourself.
 
www.espn.com

Welcome to The Pitch Clock Era: Inside the biggest thing to happen to MLB since ... maybe ever

Whether you love baseball or think it can be a snoozefest, the sport as we've known it will never be the same -- starting on Opening Day.
www.espn.com www.espn.com

Opening Day 2023: How the pitch clock will revolutionize MLB​


Jeff Passan

24–31 minutes


4:00 AM PT
  • i

    Jeff Passan
THE DRIVE FROM Tempe, Arizona, to Orange County takes roughly six hours, so Tucker Davidson had plenty of time to talk as he trekked from spring training to his home in the Los Angeles area. Just like everyone else in baseball, the 27-year-old left-hander has time at the forefront of his mind these days. The next pitch Davidson throws for the Los Angeles Angels will come with a digitized clock winding down and a penalty for its expiration.

A new brand of baseball will reveal itself to the world Thursday, when the Angels and 29 other teams inaugurate the 2023 season, or, as it will be known in future years, the beginning of the pitch clock era. It will be the most significant change to the on-field game since Jackie Robinson's arrival altered the player population.

Baseball has existed for more than a century and a half without any time constraints. The game for so long had regulated itself, but in recent years especially, the mechanics went haywire. Major League Baseball saw game times swell beyond the modern appetite, with three-hour-plus affairs the norm. The league, cognizant of fans' aversion to the game putting the time in national pastime, rolled out testing of a pitch clock across the minor leagues in 2022.

The first thorough, substantive, fair critique of the clock came last spring from Davidson, then at Triple-A in the Atlanta Braves system. In a dozen tweets, he laid out the entirety of the pitch clock experience through a player's eyes. The game was faster. That was necessary. But maybe too fast. He felt rushed. The clock was in his head. And he worried that the drama baseball naturally produced -- the downtime between pitches that let the game breathe and infused late innings with tension -- would be lost, and with it would go baseball's soul, the element that makes it different from all the other sports.

Then, in August, the Braves traded Davidson to the Angels, and he spent the final two months of the season in the big leagues. He couldn't help but notice the difference.

"Games were taking forever," Davidson said. "I was used to the fast pace. Every night, you're home at 10. There was too much dead time [in the major leagues]. I found myself looking around and wondering what we were doing.

"Now, I think the pitch clock is great. I'm still nervous about some of the unintended consequences. Are fans going to be mad they paid the same and got less baseball? Maybe. But I really like the pace, and I think they will, too."

MLB's bet on the pitch clock -- 15 seconds with the bases empty, 20 seconds with runners on, a ball assessed if pitchers don't begin their windups before it flashes triple-zero, a strike if batters aren't "alert" and facing the pitcher at the 8-second mark -- depends on people like Davidson metamorphosing from skeptic to convert to true believer. And if early returns hold up, that bet is likely to pay off.

People inside the game of baseball love the pitch clock so far. Like, love the pitch clock. Like, really love the pitch clock. Like, love-the-pitch-clock-as-much-as they-love-their-kids kind of love. Players love it, coaches love it, executives love it, owners love it. And even those who don't love it -- who think it needs to be a little longer, and umpires, who have been told to enforce it strictly, a little more lenient -- respect it for what it's doing to game times.

The average spring game last year took 3 hours, 1 minute. This spring: 2 hours, 35 minutes. They love that it's whacking nearly a half-hour without having a demonstrable effect on offense; scoring is actually up half a run per game this spring year-over-year. They love, too, how quickly they've grown accustomed to it, with pitch clock violations down by more than half since the start of spring training, at about one per game.

"We're going to have a game in the first two weeks that goes less than two hours," Davidson said. And for every fan who cringes at the idea that less baseball is a better thing, Davidson and countless others who have lived this incarnation of the game say, with all due respect, that's the wrong way to look at it. The clock means less dead time, not less baseball. From the moment the new regulations were instituted in the minors, it was obvious they would work. Nothing this spring has led anyone to believe otherwise.

"Whoever came up with the pitch clock," said one American League bench coach, "belongs in the Hall of Fame immediately."


ON Aug. 17, 2021, six executives from Major League Baseball flew to California not knowing that night would change the sport forever. They hopped into a car and drove to Rancho Cucamonga, a Los Angeles exurb near the San Gabriel Mountains, to take in a minor league game between the Low-A affiliates of the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants. For the previous two months, as part of a broad array of experiments MLB instituted throughout the minor leagues, Low-A West teams had been playing games with a pitch clock.

Upon first glance in Rancho Cucamonga, they learned what Davidson had: Pitch clock baseball is jarring, a game of constant movement. In the second inning, Raúl Ibáñez, who spent 19 years in the big leagues before taking a job as a senior vice president at MLB, looked down at his phone, a common tic among fans the game conditioned to bide their time in between pitches. Suddenly, surprisingly, he heard the crack of a bat. He turned to Morgan Sword, the MLB executive overseeing the experiments, and asked what happened. Groundout to second base, Sword said.

From that point forth, Ibáñez's eyes were glued to the field. This was the baseball he grew up watching in the 1970s and '80s, only played by those whose exposure to cutting-edge training and analytical knowledge made them far superior players. Baseball, long derided for its lack of action, could still burst with it, and all it took was a clock counting backward.
"Prior to going out there, I was skeptical," Ibañez said. "It hit me pretty quickly. This is exactly what baseball needs."

The risk is palpable. Baseball fans are notoriously reticent to evolution, let alone revolution, and the disruption to a tried and true game is the ultimate bet that the stewards of the sport, led by commissioner Rob Manfred, have correctly assessed what the game's fans desire. Surveys commissioned by the league -- among old and young, die-hards and casuals, a wide swath of people with an opinion on the game -- said fans were clear in what they wanted from the sport: a better pace and shorter games, and more action.

In addition to a clock, the league banned infield shifts and set depth restrictions for fielders, in hopes of rescuing the single from the endangered species list. It increased the size of the bases to cut the distance between them and encourage more stolen base attempts. To call these simply rule changes undersells what MLB has done: The league is actively altering the game's DNA. It's a leap of faith -- one rooted in studies and supported by data. But if for whatever reason the pitch clock is a flop, MLB, which is staking its future on it, flops with it.

"We all devote our lives to the game," Sword said. "It's really important to all of us. When you're making changes to something sacred like baseball, it can be terrifying."

On that night in Rancho Cucamonga, the feeling was far more elation than terror. Not only did the crispness of the game engage the visiting executives, but the clock was also doing precisely what it intended. Sword sent a message to a group chat that night that included Ibáñez.

"We're headed to the bottom of the ninth and it's 2 hours, 11 minutes," Sword said.

The game ended seven minutes later, nearly an hour shy of the average major league game but not uncommon for pitch clock baseball. The league officials' conversations with players and coaches in Rancho Cucamonga confirmed that this was not some bastardized version of the game but rather one that better resembled what it could be -- what it should be. The average game time in Low-A West, compared to games played earlier in the second without a pitch clock, was down more than 20 minutes. Later that night, Ibáñez, still smitten, responded to Sword's message.

"Pace of play was great!" he wrote. "We should do this at the big league level."


TO THE GROUP tasked with improving the sport, the pitch clock appeared to be a solution to MLB's white whale, an issue the league has been trying -- and failing -- to address for decades. In 1965, Kansas City A's owner Charlie Finley had Rule 8.04 -- which said that if a pitch was not thrown within 20 seconds, the umpire should assign an automatic ball -- read over his ballpark's loudspeaker before every game. On the scoreboard, he situated a clock, and with each at-bat, it would start at 20 and wind down.

The Pitch-o-meter, as it was called, was strictly for show, and Finley took it down a few weeks into the season. His one-man protest -- echoed by the game's other owner/showman, Bill Veeck, who advocated for the Pitch-o-meter in his 1965 book, "The Hustler's Handbook" -- reminds us that zealous advocacy for a pitch clock is nothing new. Even in 1965, when the average game time was 2 hours, 36 minutes, the specter of baseball being too slow hung over the game.

All of this makes the spring training success of the clock so remarkable. The solution was there the whole time. Obstructionism, tepid enforcement and sloppy rule-writing kept it from becoming more effective.

In 1995, following baseball's return from the strike that wiped out the 1994 World Series, MLB instructed hitters to stay in the batter's box during at-bats. Some complied. Most didn't. The batter's-box gambit returned in 2015, with MLB insisting players keep one foot inside it or risk fines up to $500. In spring training, Boston Red Sox star David Ortiz said the rule was "bulls---" and "I might run out of money" paying fines. He didn't need to. The league eventually gave up on enforcing it. (Ortiz, for what it's worth, is consistent in his aversion to pace measures: "I'm getting a little worried," he told ESPN. "The game has a nature that is in jeopardy because of the new rules.")

That was the first effort by Manfred to address pace of play, something he made a clear priority after his election to commissioner in 2014. Manfred suggested he was open to a pitch clock and called for the installation of a 20-second timer at two minor league levels. At first, it worked. Then pitchers realized if they stepped off the mound, the clock would reset. A pitch clock with a loophole isn't a pitch clock as much as an eyesore.

Real change began to take shape toward the end of the 2020 season, when MLB reformed its competition committee that considers on-field issues. Rather than continue running potential rules changes by owners to see what had support, the committee took a fan-centric approach, relying on the results of surveys to guide the prioritizing.

The desire for pace and action was clear, and after MLB gained direct control of the minor leagues during a reorganization of the sport implemented before the 2021 season, it endeavored to use the minors as a laboratory of sorts. Sword, the executive administering the changes, gave his team an assignment: Come up with rules that hasten the game's pace -- and, in particular, a set of pitch clock regulations that close the loopholes of past pace-of-play efforts. In 2021, the minor leagues would turn into a giant A/B test, with each level given a different rule: The clock, the shift ban, the bigger bases, limits on pickoffs and even the Automated Ball-Strike System, colloquially known as robot umpires, were tested. Most of the league's hypotheses on what could help were proving correct. One in particular stood out.

"Halfway through 2021, it became clear the most dramatic and impactful of these changes was the pitch timer," Sword said. "We knew the issues with the old version of it, and we on purpose wrote a much tighter, tougher version that forced game pace to improve. There were no holes in the rule."

After the Rancho Cucamonga trip, Sword returned to MLB headquarters and gave a presentation about the clock to Manfred and deputy commissioner Dan Halem. The bottom line: It works, he said. When combined with a limit on disengagements -- pickoff attempts or step-offs -- it works really, really well. This might not be the entire solution to what had befallen MLB -- dropping attendance and TV ratings and general interest and place in the American zeitgeist -- but at the least it would address enough problems to roll it out for a bigger sample and see if the results held up.

They did. Across every level of the minor leagues in 2022, the average pitch clock game times dipped 20-plus minutes from non-clock game times the previous year. Fans stayed at games longer. They loved the increased pace and action, according to surveys given to regulars. Scoring was steady year-over-year. Even the fear that 20 fewer minutes of game time would lead to less beer sales was unfounded. Baseball America asked a dozen minor league teams if concession revenue dropped, and the answer was a unanimous no -- with some even saying sales improved.

Manfred had more than enough to make his case, and in September 2022, with the rule-implementation window shrunk to 45 days in the new collective bargaining agreement, Manfred announced the new directives would take effect on Opening Day. Not only did it give players an offseason to prepare, the league could map out its sales pitch. It went over the rules with general managers in November at the GM meetings and managers in December at the winter meetings. In January, umpires -- perhaps the most important people in the process because of the broad discretion they're given to manage the clock -- met with the league and dove into the granular details necessary for proper enforcement.

Come February, MLB brought all the field-timing coordinators (FTCs) -- the people who start and stop the clock, with a regular and two backups at each stadium -- to a college tournament at Minute Maid Park in Houston. Each FTC was given a timer that beeped every time he or she touched the button, and for three days, during college games that were played with MLB's new rules, they practiced together, hoping to achieve synchronous beeps and establish standards to limit mistakes, which everyone recognized as an inevitability. Nearly everything was in place: the new clocks installed in stadiums, the GMs and managers willing to evangelize, the umpires and FTCs ready. All that was left were the two hardest sells: the players and the fans.

"When you are changing the rules of baseball, there is an extremely large group of people that have a strong point of view on what you're doing," Sword said. "And everyone, including casual fans, know enough about this area to have an opinion."


EARLIER THIS SPRING, following a night game that finished in less than 2½ hours, an American League manager and bench coach were sitting in the manager's office, throwing back a beer before heading out for the evening. A year ago, the idea of grabbing a drink and hitting a restaurant before closing time might as well have been fiction. Now, spring games under the lights that don't end before last call are more exception than rule.

"The game times have been incredible," said Colorado Rockies left-hander Brent Suter, who had the fastest average time between pitches last year with the bases empty at 11.4 seconds. (The league average: 18.1 seconds. And with runners on: 23.3 seconds.) "It's crisp action. I was cautiously optimistic. Now I'm really optimistic. A lot of the guys in the clubhouse have been pleasantly surprised about their ability to adjust to the clock. There's more action on the basepaths. These games have been really exciting.
"I think they got this one right. I really do. I hope my optimism isn't in the wrong place. I really hope this is great for the game."

Considering the over-my-dead-body comments of some players when queried about a potential pitch clock in the past -- "I get that there are parts of the game that we can clean up and I think there can be meaningful changes," future Hall of Famer Max Scherzer said following a 2019 spring training game that tested the clock, "but I'm fundamentally against this" -- the almost unanimous positivity among on-field personnel speaks to the clock's compelling nature. Put the 1,200 members of the MLB Players Association in a room together, and to get them to fully agree on anything is a rarity.

And yet for all the calls the MLBPA has received from players providing input on the new rules -- and there have been hundreds, many of which echoed the sentiments of New York Mets outfielder Mark Canha, who said: "Fifteen seconds with no one is a little short; kind of wish it were 20 seconds at all times" -- not one player has explicitly declared hatred of it to union officials. Even Scherzer has grown to appreciate how the clock allows him to "totally dictate the pace," though there are limits: His use of quick pitches in a spring start was quickly scuttled by the league. There are concerns of unintended consequences and potential improvements to be made, but even the cynics will acknowledge the nobility of the efforts to undo what front offices and players did to baseball, a side effect of the strategy that now guides almost every entity in baseball.

It's not that the powers that be were actively conspiring to take baseball games from exactly 2½ hours half a century ago to 3-plus hours every year since 2012. It was simply a choice: When teams and players realized they could elevate their performance with routine-oriented approaches to plate appearances -- whether it's holding the ball on the mound or stepping out of the box -- they chose themselves, their production, their team's success over the fans' desire.

Time can be a valuable performance enhancer, and mental skills coaches urged players to use it liberally, and players adopted the ethos of time equals money. They were urged on by front offices and coaching staffs that had grown more analytically inclined.

The pitch clock is baseball liposuction. It takes the unnecessary part of what the game has become -- an exercise in waiting for two players to finish routines that only they understand -- and removes it. The outcomes are not always ideal -- a game will undoubtedly end on an automatic ball or strike, as famously happened the second day of spring training between Boston and Atlanta. But they also include the chance to watch New York Yankees reliever Wandy Peralta carve up Pittsburgh Pirates infielder Tucupita Marcano on three pitches in about 20 seconds.
Those kinds of fascinating moments have been far more commonplace than the doomsday outcomes. St. Louis Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol came to spring frightened that the game would turn into a festival of violations, especially from his late-inning security blanket, reliever Giovanny Gallegos, who in 2022 had the second-slowest to the plate time with the bases empty (25.8 seconds) and runners on (30.8 seconds). Gallegos' first live bullpen session, with a clock stationed nearby, was a disaster. The second wasn't better. And then, in his initial live game action, Gallegos was fine.

"I actually think it's less disruptive than I anticipated," Marmol said. "I was planning for the worst, whether it was guys being too rushed, a conversation with players who weren't happy, guys getting [strikes] for not looking up at eight seconds. The reality is, I planned for the worst and landed in a spot where it's way better than anticipated. I like it. And we've had zero complaints from our players."

Marmol took the same sort of pragmatic approach as Yankees manager Aaron Boone, who, on the first day of spring training, told his team he would not oblige complaints about the clock. The clock was here. It wasn't going anywhere. So embrace it, Boone said, for what it is.

"We went through our meeting going over all the rules at the beginning of the year and showed the impacts it has on Triple-A," Yankees ace Gerrit Cole said, "and Gator" -- former Cy Young winner Ron Guidry -- "was sitting next to me. He looked at me and said, 'I'm going to be watching a lot more baseball this year.'"

Cole typically works quickly, and when he started practicing with a clock during his bullpen sessions in January, he knew the adjustment would go smoothly. (He faced 87 hitters without a violation this spring.) What excited Cole most was baseball aggressively trying to reshape its narrative.

"It's nice that Gator is going to watch more games," Cole said, "but we want younger kids to be drawn to the sport. ... We have to be mindful of that."

The pitch clock has fostered something that a year ago, during the lockout, seemed inconceivable: conviviality throughout the game. The league has been effusive in its praise of Kevin Slowey, the MLBPA director of player services whose role as a go-between has helped address player questions, and members of MLB's competition committee appreciate the feedback from Jack Flaherty, Tyler Glasnow, Ian Happ, Whit Merrifield and Austin Slater, players who serve the joint effort between the sides. The players adore Ibáñez, CC Sabathia and Joe Martinez, all league employees and former players, offering a perspective infrequently seen at the league office in previous years.

"There is not a 100% consensus on everything, but I believe that we have a reasonable consensus around the importance of change," said Seattle Mariners owner John Stanton, the chair of the competition committee. "It was one of the original conversations we had, the importance of having the game be more entertaining to our fans. Yet to preserve integrity, I don't want to move the fences in by 50 feet and have everyone hitting a hundred home runs, right? I think what we've done is found something that there's a consensus on, is fan-friendly and makes the game more entertaining."


MLB executives often talk about the new rules as a restoration of the game rather than a change, but before making such drastic changes, Stanton wanted hard data to prove that. At a committee meeting in the late 2010s, Toronto Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro delivered it.

Charts presented by Shapiro showed that in the late 1970s the average time between balls in play was steady at around 2 minutes, 30 seconds. In the 40 years since, the number had crept closer to 4 minutes. The time of an MLB game was increasing as the action was decreasing. "You think about that," Stanton said, "and you've got two trends that are both important that are going in the opposite direction."

A defining characteristic of the suite of new rules is action. The pitch clock is not just speeding up baseball for the sake of speeding it up, nor are the other rules without a clear purpose of creating in-game action. Nearly 40% of runs last year were scored on home runs. Now, teams can actually play for a single, stolen base and single. Hits to right field that would've been gobbled up in past by an overshifted third baseman now fall and will generate one of the game's most exciting plays that had grown dormant in recent years: a runner trying to go from first base to third and testing a right fielder's arm.
"It flows. That's the word," Ibáñez said. "When I watch the games throughout spring training, the flow of the game and rhythm of the game and cadence of the game -- it moves along. When you're watching Trout and Ohtani, sometimes you have to wait 45 minutes before they come to bat again. Not anymore."
It's fitting that Ibáñez uses Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani, the two Angels stars, because the at-bat between them that ended the World Baseball Classic also was the dying breath of the pre-pitch clock era. The transition to the new epoch is now upon the game. For all of the success in spring training, the love from people in the game, there are still unanswered questions and unknowable things.

"April is going to be a s--- show," one longtime executive said. "May will be better. And I hope October, too. But April is going to have all the viral moments and people are going to forget there are 2,430 games in a season. If one or two games have bad outcomes, that means 99.9% of games don't."
No longer are players going to have time to argue with umpires. How do they channel that frustration? The weather in April is bound to be worse in places than it was in Arizona. Will umpires and FTCs account for that with the clock? And whether it's the Trout-Ohtani at-bat or another like it, does the clock steal the verve of at-bats in the late innings or close games or the postseason?

"You know, there's going to be a call that's going to get made," Stanton said. "There's going to be a critical, late and close kind of situation where something's going to happen. And we just need to deal with those things effectively. I feel very confident that the trust and the relationships that have been built among players, umpires, owners are going to make it work. Anytime you do something new, anytime you innovate, you tend to have a situation you didn't anticipate. But I feel very confident that the relationships that we've built will allow us to address it."
If those uncertainties and questions are the price of survival, MLB will gladly pay. The pitch clock, to the league, is a matter of right and wrong. It believes the solution can be found in a 15-page document that outlines all the new rules, in five clarification memos this spring that tried to address players' questions and in the product on the field -- a cure for where the game had gone.

"Any time there's any change, right before it happens, I get anxious. Very anxious, honestly. But this is absolutely the right thing for the game," Ibáñez said. "I've got five kids. My 10-year-old boy loves baseball. There was no way I could take him to a 7:05 Marlins game on a Wednesday night. Now a 6:40 start -- we're going to a bunch of midweek games because I can. I know I can get him to bed in time.

"Midweek, Mama Bear wasn't having it. Now she's coming."

It seems all of baseball from ownership to minor leaguers are digging the pitch clock, but I'm still not a fan. I appreciate that baseball didn't have a clock and was allowed to go at a slow leisurely pace without artificial constraints.

there's gonna be a big dramatic spot in October where a pitcher is gonna be hurried under pressure and give up a ball or a hit, book it.
 
I'm curious if concession sales gonna dip since folks won't want to get up to buy beer and miss too much action
 
Thats what i was wondering myself

If i was to go wait say for example a cheesesteak or chickie and petes crab fries.. those lines would make you miss a good inning or 2 lol
 
Coupé It said:
Honestly.

I don’t think they’re going to do it because of “baseball tradition”.

I just don’t believe it.
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They may be reluctant to do it but all teams are mandated to have a City Connect uniform as part of the MLB/Nike contract.

Fully expect them to bring the same home pinstripes they currently rock and have the Yankees logo in italics or something. :lol: :smh:
 
T0INE said:
They may be reluctant to do it but all teams are mandated to have a City Connect uniform as part of the MLB/Nike contract.

Fully expect them to bring the same home pinstripes they currently rock and have the Yankees logo in italics or something. :lol: :smh:
Click to expand...
Hope they go reverse pinstripes. Like navy unis/white pnistripes and like Bronx across the chest in like an old english script or something or The Yankees Y in place of the NY. Or like an off white/cream color uni with navy pinstripes tio give that classic/throwback look.
 
frink85 said:
I'm thinking if getting up to get a hot dog is missing an entire half inning rather than 2 ABs or so, I'll stay hungry lol
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I know it was an exhibition game, but I got to the Nats/Yanks game on Tuesday at 1 PM, an hour after the game started and it was the 5th inning already :lol: Folks who are used to arriving in the 3rd are gonna feel like they wasted money this year.

A lot of dudes are gonna have to adjust their walk-up songs with the pitch clock too - was definitely noticeable that their songs weren’t getting to the drop they probably wanted it to.

 
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