Sam Miller at ESPN takes a stopwatch to game three of the 2019 World Series to try to understand why these games take so long. The whole article is well worth your time, but I want to touch on two aspects. The first is selectivity at the plate.
That’s just a pitch, one single extra 3-2 pitch. There tend to be slightly more pitches per plate appearance in the World Series than in the regular season, as strikeout pitchers face disciplined hitters and produce deeper counts. The difference was minimal for this game, though: In Game 3, there were 3.94 pitches per plate appearance, compared to 3.93 in the regular season, which is one extra pitch. So that’s those 20 seconds.
ESPN.com
It struck me that in the series as a whole, batters were not only extremely disciplined, they were extremely good at recognizing edge calls. That’s where there was a lot of complaining about the umpiring. Batters were taking pitches when a swing should be expected, pitches that were close enough to be strike but just outside the strike zone. The batters were willing to wait for their pitch, and lay off otherwise.
From what I read about pace of play, people seem to not just want faster games, but more action. A seven pitch at bat where the count goes full because the batter doesn’t swing until there are two strikes is not that interesting. We need a way to encourage the batters to swing more often and sooner.
The second aspect concerns pitchers taking their time between pitches:
Nearly every pitcher in this World Series has worked more slowly than he did during the regular season. On average, World Series pitchers have taken an extra 1.5 seconds between pitches with the bases empty and an extra three seconds per pitch with men on base.
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All those extra seconds add up to 13 minutes, compared to the regular season, but even that total probably undersells it.
Miller wants to address this with a pitch clock, but doesn’t want to sell it as a pace of play issue:
If the league really wanted to cut the time pitchers spend between pitches in the most important innings of the year, they would do better to consider pitch-clock rules as explicit efforts to hamper pitcher performance, not to save time but to strengthen the actual competition on the field. Those sorts of changes are common in setting (or changing) the rules of game play: imposing play clocks and shot clocks in other sports, banning spitballs and regulating mound height in baseball.
The main thing keeping offense going in baseball right now is the juiced ball; otherwise, pitchers are and have been ascendant for the past decade, with strikeout rates setting records every season. If the dead ball goes away — and since Major League Baseball claims not to know what caused the dead ball, it also doesn’t know how to preserve it — baseball could quickly enter a new dead ball era.
So baseball has super selective hitters who don’t swing until they get their pitch or the count forces them to swing. We have pitchers who improve their performance by taking their time pitching. They work the edges, and batters don’t want to swing at the edges. I like that Miller is thinking in terms of strengthening the competition on the field.
So in addition to the pitch clock, I’d like to see changes where both the batter and pitcher give up something to get a better game. Baseball should move the mound back one foot or so and expand the strike zone vertically.
Note that over time, pitchers keep getting taller.
| Decade | Average Height (in.) per iP |
| 1960s | 72.7 |
| 1970s | 73.1 |
| 1980s | 74.2 |
| 1990s | 74.4 |
| 2000s | 74.6 |
| 2010s | 74.7 |
And we have a year left in this decade. Pitchers on average grew two inches since the 1960s, meaning they are releasing the ball closer to the plate and delivering it from a higher point. Moving the mound back a foot would give the batter slightly more time to see the ball, and maybe make better contact.
The strike zone shrunk over time as batters decided they wanted to swing at lower pitches. Raising the top of the zone would force them to go after high pitches. Pitchers could get ahead of batters more quickly, and maybe not need to nibble so much. Maybe with two strikes, batters would choke up a little more and try to line a ball into the gap rather than upper cut over the fences.
Working faster and throwing farther hurts pitchers, while a bigger strike zone hurts batters. If the hurt is compensated by more balls in play, the pain will be worth it.