How MLB's new pace-of-play rules will (or won't) affect 2015 season
— -- BRADENTON, Fla. -- For a month now, baseball's shiny new pace-of-game speed-up lab has been spewing smoke out of Rob Manfred's test tubes.
Countdown timers tick. Hitters keep half a toe in the batter's box. Umpires point fingers. Between-innings promotions are cut off in mid-schtick.
And a month into this fascinating experiment, here's what we're wondering: Will anybody really notice?
From his primo seat in row two, Infield Section 8, at storied McKechnie Field, spectator Tom Rogers actually asks this question himself -- and then tells us exactly what sort of dish he thinks baseball has ordered up on its pace-of-game grill:
"It's a nothing-burger so far," he says, unequivocally. "It absolutely has not changed the pace of anything."
Rogers has been attending two or three games a week since the start of spring training, just being a fan. He spent two decades before that working as a scout for the Pirates and Mets. And now, after staring intently at those newfangled between-innings countdown timers for weeks, he's having a tough time telling the difference between the games he used to watch and the games he's watching now.
"Just about every game we've seen so far this spring, it's been a three-hour game, or more," he says. "We've had one 3½-hour game. Probably, if you look at it at the end of the year, it might take a minute or two off the average time, and it would be a big victory for the new commissioner. And anything helps. But I really haven't seen any difference. And I've been watching the clocks since they first went up. Just for the heck of it. Just to watch it. And I haven't seen any difference at all in the pace of the game, whether it's changing pitchers or between innings."
Well, for what it's worth, baseball's data shows that average spring training game times are down by several minutes. On the other hand, it's spring training. So nobody is pretending that means much of anything. The only part that's truly meaningful is this:
Baseball is trying.
It's trying to listen, trying to change, trying to adapt with the times, in more ways than one. It deserves a lot of credit for that. And much of that credit goes to the new commissioner, who has made that an obvious priority.
"I think it's important," says Rob Manfred, "for players and fans to have the impression that we're interested in hearing what they have to say about the game."
Well, as always, we're here to help. All spring, we've been asking players and fans, not to mention managers and umpires, what they think of the new pick-up-the-pace rules. So let's start with the most surprising thing the commissioner should know:
Despite all the clocks and all the hoopla, the differences in the game are almost imperceptible.
"I don't see a big change in speeding the game up," says Phillies manager Ryne Sandberg. "I haven't noticed that at all."
"To be honest, I don't even think about it," says Tigers catcher Alex Avila.
"I asked our guys not to let it rent space in their brain," says Nationals manager Matt Williams, "because if they're thinking about that, then they're not concentrating on the game itself. But we haven't had any issue. Everybody's playing the game like they normally play it. And everything's on time."
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