New pitch clock provokes players but is great for major league baseball

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The most exciting thing about the coming baseball season is no longer baseball. It’s the organized chaos promised by the new pitch clock.

The new device is designed to hurry the world’s most languorous professional athletes along. No more wandering off the mound to wipe your forehead meditatively for a full minute while staring up at clouds. No more Nomar Garciaparra’ing your batting gloves on-and-off, on-and-off, on-and-off for an hour between pitches.

Upon taking the ball, the pitcher now has 15 seconds to begin his delivery if the bases are empty. If there are hitters on, he has 20 seconds.

In the lead-in to this change, most of the discussion focused on how pitchers would deal with this change. But it’s the hitters who seem most affected in the very early going.

Batters must have both feet in the box and be ready to receive with eight seconds remaining on the clock. So, really, it’s a hit clock more than it is a pitch clock.

A pitching infraction results in an automatic called ball. A hitting penalty is a called strike.

It took only one full day of games to see the most extreme, Keystone Kops example of where this could lead. On Saturday, the Boston Red Sox and Atlanta Braves were tied 6-6 in the bottom of the ninth. Atlanta’s Cal Conley was at the plate with two out, facing a 3-2 count.

As Conley was futzing around in the box, the home plate umpire jumped up out of his crouch. Conley began to jog to first. He thought the pitcher had done something. Clearly, in that moment, he didn’t know what that something was. He was lost in the changing game.

Conley was the one who’d done something. He’d been staring at the ground as the clock ran down, and just been struck out on two pitches. Game over (they don’t do extra innings in spring training).

Afterward, Conley blamed the catcher.

“Not really sure if the pitcher was ready to go, but the catcher definitely wasn’t,” Conley told reporters.

Conley, a professional baseball player, doesn’t understand how the new baseball rules work. The catcher can do a handstand until the clock runs out. The onus is on the hitter to be ready first.

The good news is that the pitch clock works. That Boston-Atlanta game featured 37 players in the field. There were 15 pitching changes. There were only two three-up, three-down innings.

Last year, that’s a 3 1/2-hour game, minimum. Maybe four hours if people are feeling too lazy to jog in from the bullpen.

On Saturday, the official game time was 2 hours 39 minutes.

Last season, the average length of a major-league baseball game drifted over three hours. Nothing that calls itself entertainment should take more than three hours. I mean, you could sit around watching 16 hours of Berlin Alexanderplatz or you could spend 4 1/2 hours watching the Yankees take a million pitches. Some people enjoy that sort of thing, but it’s no regular person’s idea of an electric night out.

The pitch clock is a vital change to a game that had lost sight of what it is. It’s not a holy and immutable ritual. It’s a product for sale. If your product is boring people, it’s time to switch it up.

What nobody could ballpark exactly was how much it would unsettle the players. The answer so far – a lot.

Part of that is down to the clock itself – looming behind the catcher like a Doomsday device. Ticking, ticking, ticking. It’s easy to lose track of what the players are doing and stare at the clock instead.

If it’s that hypnotic to the viewer, how must it seem to the players? Somehow they will have to learn how to internalize the clock while resisting the urge to continually keep track of it. We’re about to see how much concentration is required to play elite baseball.

Right now, everybody’s having a good laugh about the clock. Atlanta was more amused than bemused after it cost it a (meaningless) win.

Conley seemed embarrassed rather than angry – a new one for baseball players, none of whom have ever broken a rule or misjudged a strike in their lives.

They won’t be laughing in September when some batter’s brain cramp costs the team a game in a post-season push. And they won’t be laughing in June when an out-of-shape pitcher is sucking wind during a long third inning because he can’t take his usual rest between exertions. You go out and throw a ball as hard as you can 30 times in eight minutes. It’s not as easy as it looks.

Like all revolutions, the pitch clock will be hardest on the establishment. All the veterans who’ve done things one way for 30 years now have to do it another way right at the end.

It’s not the difference that’s the problem. It’s the opportunity for an excuse. In a slump in April? Must be the pitch clock. Can’t find a rhythm in the middle of your starts? The pitch clock.

Every ballplayer goes through performance troughs. Now they have something other than themselves to blame it on.

Aside from the medium-sized games, what I’m really looking forward to are the meltdowns. Just imagine how many times we will get to see some purple-faced manager steaming out of his dugout to scream about how his guy was looking the pitcher dead in the eyes as the clock struck eight. I long for the first time a big baseball occasion is decided by a batter staring absently into the dugout for a sign as the clock winds down.

How many postgame apologies, excuses and freak-outs are we in store for? How long until someone goes on a rant about how change ruins everything, and that morphs into one of those hysterical American conversations about another crumbling institution?

For the first time in a while, baseball seems bright with tumultuous possibility. It’s a lesson other, equally creaky sports might want to study.