Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt Arnold
The #1 change they could do would be to actually enforce batters leaving the box between pitches. There's no reason they should need to undo and redo their glove, belt, cap, etc... every pitch. Even just shaving 2 second per pitch would be something like 8-10 minutes per game saved, maybe more. And 2 seconds is just to get back to what things were in the early 2000s, never mind back to the actual rulebook or to how things were back in the 90s or before.
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This would be a seemingly simple change, it's true, and the whole walking around between pitches thing is something that was just plain not done like 30 years ago. There was even a guy who played for the Indians named Rick Manning who was called "The Human Rain Delay" because... he did the thing that basically every single batter is doing.
My main issue with doing this is that it puts a lot on the umpires, especially early in the season, and for all our talk about how ornery those guys are, they really *don't* like to make the guys they're adjudicating angry with them for little reason. That's a big part of why the 20 second delay of game rule is rarely if ever enforced (and when it is, it's usually enforced on the home team when, say, the big TV screen in the outfield starts counting everyone down) and I also think it's kind of behind how strike zones slowly shrink or expand over the course of both individual games as well as multiple seasons.
From their standpoint, this represents a thing you have to be mean about with pretty much every single batter on every single play, and there has to be *some* amount of give and take on that for when a guy actually needs to knock a rock out of his cleats or just get his head together after a high and inside fastball. Some umpires, given the choice between pissing off 18 guys who they have to interact with on a daily basis and 2 or 3 guys who are probably stationed across the country (who do write their paychecks, sure, but umpires aren't just in this to please their bosses), are going to heavily err on the side of giving the hitter a break, perhaps to the extent of non-enforcement.
IMO this is the sort of thing you probably need to introduce in the minors first and then, once the younger guys are all used to not taking their time, you bring it in after, say, 5 years or so.