Count new Chicago Cubs ace Jon Lester as a baseball purist. With the news that baseball will experiment with pitch clocks at the Double-A and Triple-A levels this seasons, Lester hopes that such measures never reach Major League Baseball.
“It’s baseball. It’s a beautiful sport,” Lester said, via the Chicago Tribune. “There’s no time limit, no shot clock ... there’s no nothing. ... The fans know what they are getting into when they show up. So if it’s a three-hour game, it’s a three-hour game. If it’s a five-hour game, it’s a five-hour game. There’s nothing you can do to change that.”
Lester argues that if you begin to control the pacing of the game with such implements as a pitch, or 'shot clock,' some of the game's most interesting nuances could fall by the wayside.
“Once you put a shot clock on a pitcher or the hitter or whatever … I feel like if you go from a three-hour game to a 2-hour, 50-minute game … is that really going to make a difference?” Lester said. “If you do that it takes the beauty out of the game.”
In fact, the entire dynamic of pitchers' battles with hitters could be at stake.
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“There’s such a cat-and-mouse game as far as messing up a hitter’s timing, messing up pitchers’ timing … different things that fans and people who have never played this game don’t understand,” Lester said.
“I think you are going down a path you don’t want to go down.”
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