Pitching Pace Through the Years

My recent contribution to THT’s series of suggestions for the new commissioner of baseball drew a pleasing response from our readers. The comments section had a few observations and suggestions that developed into a fresh idea for how to look at the changing pace of play in baseball.

First, however, I need to update what baseball has done in the weeks since my piece came out, and to suggest anew what it might want to do instead.

Manfred on the Clock

Events have picked up steam since I offered incoming Commissioner Rob Manfred my thoughts on the pace of play in baseball. A notable proposal did come out of the January owners’ meeting, and Manfred himself chimed in with his thoughts in his first interview as commissioner. What’s being offered is definitely change, but perhaps not progress.

The owners agreed to use a pitch clock at Double-A and Triple-A ballgames starting this year. As in the Arizona Fall League’s experiment, pitchers will now have 20 seconds from when they receive the ball to come set to make their pitch (or their throw to a base). The plan appears to be for this trial to last two years, giving MLB time to negotiate use of the clock in the majors with the players’ union.

This fits with Manfred’s own rhetoric. In what became a rather infamous interview he gave just after taking office, he praised the experiments run in the AFL, implying they would be the basis of reforms in the majors. (He also spoke of eliminating defensive shifts to restore lost offense to the game. Plenty of others have weighed in on the matter, so I needn’t chase that diversion.)

I didn’t directly offer my opinion of on-field play clocks in my last piece, though one could infer it from the things I did say. Faced with overt actions and statements, it’s time to be more overt myself. A clock on the field in baseball would be a clumsy mis-step, a technological distraction excessive for its otherwise worthwhile purpose.

Yes, football and basketball have play clocks. So what? Baseball doesn’t need to make itself more like football, any more than football or basketball needs to change itself into something more like baseball. Each sport has its own character, and should not change that character because “everyone else is doing it,” but because of the true needs of the sport.

Baseball already has the mechanism by which to enforce a quicker pace of play: the umpires. Have them keep time themselves, as in some cases the rulebook already says they should. Enforce limits on pitchers and batters alike (yes, enough stepping out of the box), and make sure all players understand that this comes from the league, not from the caprices of the men in black. Give umpires the authority, or re-emphasize the authority they already have that has fallen into disuse, and they can make a real difference.

Just as important, it will be a method already organic to the game. It won’t add a fresh accretion to the mechanisms of play, helping turn the game ever more byzantine. (Think in terms of the tax code. Or don’t, if you’ve got a weak constitution.) Instant replay, necessary as it was, already did that recently, and baseball doesn’t need more of the same right now.

Do I guarantee this will work? I do not. But if we’re already waiting two years before bringing in the game-show equipment, why not use that time trying a solution that might achieve effective results for a minimum of disruption? If after two years things haven’t improved enough, then the play clocks will come in, on schedule. How much better, though, if they turn out not to be necessary?

Commissioner Manfred shows himself a technophile, and there are a lot of ways this can be a big benefit to the business of baseball. In this age of miniaturization, though, he ought to see that the best advances don’t come in ENIAC-style room-sized bulk, but slip easily into your pocket.

Try the slim approach first, Commissioner.

Clock-tober

A reader going by the handle of Bucdaddy makes frequent appearances in our Comments section, and more than one for “Turn Back the Clock.” One of his comments looked back on Game Seven of the 1960 World Series, a seesaw 10-9 affair and a true classic. He marveled that, for the enormous pressure, the very high score, and the nine pitchers toeing the rubber, the game took just two hours and 36 minutes.

Another commenter, with the moniker of The Stranger, offered that he’d like to see breakdowns of where the time goes in games, with modern ones compared to 1992, the year the now departed Bud Selig took office.

Longtime THT staffer Joe Distelheim, having read the comments with interest similar to mine, suggested I might want to break out a stopwatch, time the 1960 game and a modern one, and contrast the paces of the two. I liked the idea, but also wanted to include something from 1992, showing where the game was when Bud came in. A couple other games sneaked in, and I had a project.

I didn’t know at the time how time-burning a project it would be, but I won’t complain much. If I have to sacrifice by watching great baseball games to answer your questions, I bow to the wishes of our readers.

Technically I didn’t have to make them all great games, but it worked out better that way. All the games I picked for the study came either in the World Series or in a League Championship Series. Whatever influence the postseason limelight might have on the pace of play would therefore apply to all the games.

Four of the six games I selected were conveniently available to me in the “Baseball’s Greatest Games Collector’s Edition” DVD set issued several years ago. A fifth hadn’t been played at that time, but has found its way into my personal collection since then. The sixth is a lovely little gem available for viewing free at the “MLBClassics” channel of YouTube. The games are, in chronological order:

1952 World Series, Game Seven (Yankees/Dodgers)
1960 World Series, Game Seven (Yankees/Pirates)
1975 World Series, Game Six (Reds/Red Sox)
1992 NLCS, Game Seven (Pirates/Braves)
2003 ALCS, Game Seven (Red Sox/Yankees)
2011 World Series, Game Six (Rangers/Cardinals)

(The five linked games can be seen in full on YouTube via official MLB channels, though you’ll want to jump about half an hour ahead for the 2011 video. The 1960 game is not posted by MLB, so I haven’t linked it, but if you want to find it you probably can.)

I decided to concentrate on one aspect of the game: the time it took for pitchers to make their deliveries to home plate (or pickoff throws to bases). Other aspects of the game would be extremely challenging to time accurately. For example, measuring the length of mid-inning pitching changes would, in more recent games, require knowing just how long commercial breaks lasted. (They obviously aren’t included in the videos.) One could also question how much blame for the delay belonged to the advertising rather than the manager’s switcheroo or the reliever’s slow warm-up.

So I timed every pitch I was able to, which depended on whether I was offered camera angles that allowed it. For everything other than the first pitch of a plate appearance, I started the timer when the pitcher received the ball, and stopped when he released it toward home or a base. (First pitches required a different method, which evolved in a way I’ll explain as I review the games themselves.) When the cameras were looking elsewhere at the critical moment, I had to mark “no time.” The frequency of these instances changed markedly, as again I’ll show later.

Rather than lumping everything into a “time to pitch” category, I made divisions. Pitches with men on come with more distractions than those with empty bases, so I kept them separate. Likewise, timing of the first pitch of a plate appearance starts at a different point than later pitches, so I tallied them separately.

I did not time intentional walks. The grumble with the free pass is not how long it takes to make each pitch, but that time is burned toward a (mostly) foreordained result. I will note from informal observation that intentional balls are quicker than most other pitches with men on base, and that the process did take longer the closer one got to the present day.

This is not quite a rigorously scientific examination. Six games trying to cover a range of six decades cannot be comprehensive. As long as we take what we learn from this as more oracular than dispositive, we won’t go too far astray.

What follows now are my comments and thoughts about each game I studied, beginning with 1960 for reasons I’ll reveal in time. The statistical breakdown of the data comes in a table following this section. You can scroll down to it now, or any time you think I’m getting long-winded. You will, though, be missing some nice commentary, and even actual data.

With each game, I give the average time for that season’s games, along with the time for the game I viewed.

1960
Average game time 2:38:12
World Series Game Seven game time 2:36

This was a good game for learning the ropes of pitch timing. The cameras stayed on the battery a great deal of the time, allowing precise measurement. (Cameras following foul balls for an extended time did disrupt this. TV still had adjustments to make.) Indeed, I got to see the pitcher, catcher, batter and umpire so much that I ended up using the ump’s eccentricity as a timing mechanism.

Just starting out, I was unsure when to begin timing for the first pitch of a plate appearance. I watched home plate umpire Bill Jackowski for signals he might make to the pitcher, such as the point toward the mound you’ll sometimes see when an umpire calls time back in. Jackowski didn’t do that, not much, but he did something even more distinctive.

As an at-bat began, Jackowski would adjust his mask, then pose his arms for a second, thumbs under the armpits, fingers held across the chest as if covering his nipples with his fingertips. Perhaps erroneously, I took this as a signal that he was prepared for the pitch, and began timing on that gesture. It lasted me the whole game.

The game was as admirably brisk as Bucdaddy remembered, coming in under the season average despite 19 runs being scored. The pitchers’ pace was incredibly quick at times, but it wasn’t always sustained, and it certainly slowed down with men on. The biggest time-waster of the game might have been Yogi Berra. He would come to the plate with two bats, swinging them both a couple times just outside the box before tossing one over to the batboy. It was a noticeable disruption of the game’s flow, perhaps more so for being unique.

I’ll also briefly note one technical limitation of the broadcast. Player names were given with a simple one-line graphic, with limited space. Yankees catcher Johnny Blanchard had to be rendered as “John Blanchard,” and very notably, Roberto Clemente was compacted to “R. Clemente.” (They wisely didn’t go with “Bob”: Clemente deplored that.)

It’s a pity Vinegar Bend Mizell didn’t come in to pitch for Pittsburgh. I would love to have seen how they handled that.

1975
Average game time 2:29:45
World Series Game Six game time 4:01

Home plate umpire Satch Davidson didn’t do anything as distinctive as the armpit-nipple move, so I had to learn a fresh method of timing the first pitch of each plate appearance. I took as my text Chapter Eight, Verse Four—okay, Rule 8.04—of the Official MLB rules. This is the universally ignored section giving the pitcher 12 seconds to pitch with nobody on base. The time starts when the pitcher has the ball and “the batter is in the box, alert to the pitcher.” It’s not the King James Version, but there is a certain poetry to that.

So when the batter was in the box, both hands on the bat, and took his first look forward to the mound, I started the stopwatch. This served me well for the rest of my study.

An odd complication arose when some pitches were not shown being made. NBC was showing off the camera it had inside the Green Monster, and sometimes used it to shoot lefty batters alone as the pitch came in. I had to make an approximate time deduction for how long the pitch took to reach the batter, rough but quite workable. This didn’t stop me from getting ticked off at this camera, despite how it would take the most famous shot in baseball history at the end of the game.

Instant replay made its first appearance, and it also was annoying to my purposes. NBC replayed Fred Lynn’s first-inning homer so often that it entirely missed the subsequent first pitch to Rico Petrocelli. A few other times the cameras were too distracted to catch the start of a plate appearance, although I still missed fewer pitches in this game than for 1960, or any other.

There were obvious factors slowing the pace of this game, and the most notable was Luis Tiant. His amazing mound gyrations probably added a bit of time on normal pitches, but when he was holding men on first, pace went out the window. Coming set was a drawn-out process, as he drew his hands down in a herky-jerky ratcheting rhythm, slowing to a barely perceptible glide before setting. Observe, in this snippet from the fifth inning.

This was certainly rhythm-wrecking, keeping batter and runner alike off-balance. Was it time-wasting? Fenway fans didn’t think so; Riverfront Stadium might have given a different review.

Then there was George Foster, one of the earliest masters of stepping out on a pitcher. What’s notable is that it was notable: he stood out starkly from most of the other batters, which he wouldn’t today. He did get booed for it, especially with a two-fer in the 10th inning. (Forgive the static at the start.)

When Boston pinch-hitter Rick Miller pulled Foster-style moves, of course, there weren’t any boos. Dick Drago, Boston reliever, did get booed for a sequence of six pickoff throws in the 10th, though. And Dave Concepcion still swiped second.

The game was very long compared to the average: factor in extra innings, and it still lasted 40 minutes more than you would expect. For all that, the pace wasn’t not actually bad. There was a significant stoppage when Fred Lynn got banged up running into the outfield wall in the fifth, excusing some of the overage. For the rest, perhaps it’s just evidence of how great this game was that it never really seemed to drag.

1992
Average game time 2:54:21
NLCS Game Seven game time 3:22

The decay of pacing showed in what should have been an unremarkable 3-2 game, though as in 1975, there were outside events lengthening game time. An 11-minute delay happened when home plate umpire John McSherry left the game for the hospital, with severe dizziness. It was a ghastly foreshadowing of the day three and a half years later when he would have a fatal heart attack behind the plate on Opening Day in Cincinnati.

There was also some on-field action slowing things down without actually entering my pacing equations. Pirates batters had a bothersome tendency to dig in, dig in, and dig in some more when first entering the batter’s box. It took so long that the camera would go find something else to watch, meaning I could not tell when the batter was alert to the pitcher and thus I couldn’t time the pitch. Andy Van Slyke, I expected better of you!

I did have hopes of a quick pace, given to me by Tim McCarver. “If you’re keeping score at home,” he said of Pirates starter Doug Drabek, “write quickly. Shorthand.” Alas, he misled. Drabek’s pitch times were more than a second above overall game average with bases empty, and over three seconds above average with runners on. Didn’t know McCarver was doing Tim-isms as early as 1992: I remembered him actually being a great color man back then.

Commercial breaks made their first great intrusion into the viewing experience. Television cut the return to play so closely that the first pitch of an inning often came within a very few seconds. This cost me more than half of the 18 first pitches in the game, since the batter became alert to the pitcher while those other “pitchers” were still pitching. This cut my sample size, and made it all the more fortunate that I counted situational pitch categories separately.

Pace lengthened in almost all cases. Even in pitching with men on, where Tiant stretched out the ’75 game, ’92 ended up longer by over a second per pitch. First pitches with no runners came in shorter, but with commercials stealing many of those data points, the reliability of that result is dubious. And the problem would get worse before it got a little better.

2003
Average game time 2:49:53
ALCS Game Seven game time 3:56

In fact, almost everything that seemed to go wrong in ’92 did so double in 2003. Commercial breaks crowded against first pitches two-thirds of the time. Nearly every batter was digging into the box like he expected to strike a vein of gold, leading a bored camera to look elsewhere. In fact, the camera was always looking elsewhere, at the grim, determined faces of everyone on both teams watching the action, looking at the pitcher and batter only when it had to.

The excuse for this is that it was high human drama, an all-or-nothing game featuring the fiercest rivalry in baseball, not to mention two of the greatest starting pitchers in the game. So of course there were lingering close-ups of Pedro Martinez and Roger Clemens (and other pitchers later), rather than showing the batter stepping in and making my job easier, or possible. I mean, c’mon, this might be Rocket’s last game ever! (He would pitch for four more seasons.)

I’m a Yankees fan. I’m invested in the rivalry. And this was way overboard even for me.

Not to mention that I had an objective other than cheering, and this game was a timekeeper’s nightmare. The hyperkinetic edits, looking at almost anyone but the battery, cost me a full 20 percent of the game’s pitches. I guess we’re lucky TV  didn’t come back from commercial to the bottom of the 11th in the middle of Aaron Boone’s swing.

When I could get times, though, I was tracking one particular player. Nomar Garciaparra became notorious for his time-wasting ways at the plate, giving the Velcro on his batting gloves a workout seemingly before every pitch. I wanted to see how much worse his pace was than for the average batter in this game.

(This is also why I had to use the 2003 game in the set, which the Yankees won, and not 2004, which the Yankees lost. Garciaparra was with the Cubs when the 2004 playoffs rolled around. I had no choice but to use the Yankees’ win. Really! Why are you looking at me that way?)

I took the 18 pitches to Garciaparra I was able to time, and compared their pace with the overall mean in the four categories they fit (combinations of first pitch/not first pitch and bases empty/man or men on). Garicaparra came in a combined 6.4 seconds … quicker than average. Wow. The best conclusion I can reach from an admittedly narrow data set is that Garciaparra’s dallying simply disappeared into the background of the endemic time-wasting in that game. What a contrast to George Foster.

The arguable chief offender against pace in the game was a shock to me: Mariano Rivera. For the 41 pitches from Mo I could time, using the same methodology as with Nomar, Rivera was a cumulative 71.4 seconds slower than the average. Relievers do generally have slower paces than starters, but hearing that is one thing and watching it another.

Sorry, Mariano. I’m such a big fan, but facts are stubborn things. You were a bigger drag chain on that game than Nomar, and who imagined I’d reach that conclusion?

2011
Average game time 2:56:33
World Series Game Six game time 4:33

The TV cameras were as cutaway-happy as ever, but on-field sound made up for it. Yes, I can explain that peculiar sentence. With the excellent field microphones Fox had for this game, I could hear the pop of a ball into a glove. Specifically, the pitcher’s glove getting the ball back from the catcher. Even with the camera looking elsewhere, I could often tell when to start timing for the next pitch, so my number of lost pitches inched downward.

Now for criticism to offset the praise. This happened in 2003 also, but was still going on in 2011. Video of the pitcher and batter from the center-field camera was de-synchronized from other video, showing what happened a split-second behind the rest of the coverage. Audio was likewise delayed. While you might not be able to notice the chicanery from watching the pitcher, hearing a hiccup in the spectators’ sounds—a chant of “Let’s Go YaYankees” or “LeLet’s Go Cardinals”—was a giveaway. You might also notice grounders getting through the infield awfully fast.

I think I know why Fox did (and does) this. Play-by-play would be done to the un-delayed action, so the announcer would sound quicker to us, and thus better, in announcing balls, strikes, and related batting actions. This trick is an annoyance in watching once you recognize it, and it’s also an annoyance if you’re hoping for absolutely precise timing of pitches. Luckily, I was generally starting the timer on the same angle as I stopped it, so my data shouldn’t be too skewed. (Plus, it’d be by just a couple tenths of a second. Still, I grumble.)

Pitch times did fall from the 2003 ALCS. If you want a culprit for the much longer time this 11-inning game took than the 11-inning game in ’03, there are two. Higher score is one—at 10-9, the same score that we saw in 1960’s 2:36 game. The other is mid-inning pitching changes, with five. Ironically, Tony LaRussa made just one of them.

Still, the pitchers found a way to expand the limits of dithering. For the first time, I recorded pitches that took more than a minute. Two of them, with a third I couldn’t time but that must have gone past that limit—and it was a first pitch! Two others lasted more than 58 seconds.

I wish I could say these are the only pitches in the study I had taking more than a minute, but surprisingly I can’t. The longest pitch, though, had a pretty good excuse.

1952
Average game time 2:25:50
World Series Game Seven game time 2:54

I originally tried to time this game near the start of my project, but quickly gave it up as hopeless. After experience taught me some tricks, I tried again after the 2011 game and had a fairly easy time. I’m glad I kept at it.

There is so much I could say about experiencing this broadcast, even in attenuated form with my attention focused on stopwatch work. If I starting giving a few representative details, I would not have any place to stop. I can only encourage you to watch for yourself. It is an education in the history of baseball, not to mention a pretty good game.

Not to say it wasn’t a bit slow in places, at least compared to 1960’s example. Red Barber commented on the broadcast that Dodgers starter Joe Black was at his most deliberate pace of the year. This is perhaps understandable. It was just Black’s fifth career big-league start—and his third in the World Series. (For other notable things Barber said, watch the game. I will keep nagging you.)

Yogi was doing his part to slow the pace, still—okay, already doing his two-bats maneuver before stepping to the plate. It’s notable that the Ebbets Field PA man announced him as “Larry Berra.” The TV broadcast, apparently using the same graphics still in use in 1960, used “Yogi,” but rendered fellow Yankees Johnny Mize and Billy Martin as “John” and “Bill.” It left the Dodgers alone, though: Pee Wee Reese wasn’t “Harold,” and Jackie Robinson was still Jackie.

Oh brother, was he ever still Jackie. The longest pitch of the day, and of the entire study, came in this game, a whopping 1:37.5 in the bottom of the fourth. The main cause of the huge delay goes to prove that slow pace does not always mean wasted time.

Listen to the fans cheering Robinson’s bluffs. When else have you heard such cheers for the play of a baseball game when the ball never went anywhere? (And I mean for the game itself. Morganna, skydivers and rally squirrels don’t count.) Any reform that took this away would be doing the game a disservice.

Having somebody in the game who could create such excitement would also be nice. Billy Hamilton, care to take that as a challenge?

How the Numbers Add Up

Game times are in hours and minutes. Throwing times are in seconds. The bottom row is throws I could not time, compared to total throws in the game.

Year	1952	1960	1975	1992	2003	2011
Av. Gm. Time	2:26	2:38	2:30	2:54	2:50	2:56
First/Empty	8.3	6.4	7.7	7.1	8.1	5.9
First/Men On	12.0	8.8	10.9	11.5	9.8	9.7
Later/Empty	14.7	12.8	13.1	14.7	17.2	14.2
Later/Men On	22.0	15.3	20.6	21.8	23.3	23.4
Throws Missed	21/271	15/260	11/377	44/275	68/334	57/378

Leave out the first and last games, and times march almost unanimously upward. However, Game Six in 2011 makes for a surprising dip, and Game Seven in 1952 could easily be taken for a 21st-century game in its pitch times. What’s going on?

There might be biases from the players and teams chosen. One starter’s pacing style, or a team tendency laid down by a strong-willed pitching coach, could produce results well outside the norm. The latter possibility, teams playing faster or slower than normal, I was able to check, but results were all over the map.

The participants in the 1952 Series did play slower regular-season games than average, adding up to about 10 minutes; in 1960 they were both quicker than the mean, by a combined four minutes. This would partially explain those games’ deviations, but the others weren’t so neat. The Braves and Pirates, who played a slow-paced game, were both quicker in the regular season. The Rangers and Cardinals, faster before October, played a crawling Game Six, even as pitching pace stepped up.

(In all six games, the teams were either both above or both below average game speed. There’s no apparent reason why they’d match up: it just happened. And for those of you wondering, the Yankees and Red Sox were slower than the mean in 2003, but by a modest combined four minutes, not quite the boat anchors they were cracked up to be. Most of the overage belonged to the Yankees.)

More likely, this is the risk that comes from representing whole years with single-game samples. In short, variance happens. Conceivably that variance was raised by these games being so good: a more random sample that picked middling or outright dull games might hew closer to the expected trendlines. That would be tough to study, at least for older games, as blowouts aren’t preserved as sedulously as nail-biters.

The objective pitch times don’t measure the slowing pace as strongly as my own subjective perceptions gauged it. Watching the 1960 to 2011 games in chronological order, I had a definite impression that things were taking longer and longer. I recognize some biases I might introduce to those feelings. The merely good 1992 game might feel less snappy than the truly great 1975 one, though it doesn’t quite work in reverse when viewing the continuously exciting 2011 contest in contrast to 2003’s lesser game.

Of course, pitch times are not the entirety of a baseball game, or even a majority. There are plenty of other places for time to be wasted, ones others already have rooted out for scrutiny. Proliferating pitching changes have brought proposals to change relief rules. Commercial breaks are universally deplored, but neither owner nor player will shave his income to save us half a minute per half-inning. Possibly the only untilled ground may be in getting the batter promptly into the box when it’s his turn at bat—and I wouldn’t bet that nobody’s jumped on that.

The pace of pitching has lengthened over the years, but not so obviously and consistently that it should be the only focus of those wanting to tighten up the game (not that it is). The matter will probably require multiple approaches, and here I circle back to my arguments both from my last article and earlier in this one. The best method to get the game moving on multiple fronts is to give umpires the mandate to move it along.

I know, I know. Who would have thought the umpire could be the fans’ best friend?

References and Resources

• Retrosheet for season-by-season game times
• Baseball-Reference for postseason game times and other game information
• SB Nation for its reporting on Commissioner Manfred’s comments
• Mike Petriello of FanGraphs guided me on how to embed excerpts of YouTube videos. Much, much better than giving you the whole thing and telling you to fast-forward.