Find your seats, everyone! Mike Matheny is fingering his chin on the dugout steps!
Eons ago, The Committee to Modernize Baseball - a collection of looming, soundless monoliths arranged in a semi-circle deep within the Shadow Realm - made a decision. Or, more accurately, a mysterious, near-indecipherable series of hieroglyphics appeared engraved on them that no one had noticed before, and that ancient scrawl was taken back to our dimension and transcribed into baseball law.
That law became quite cataclysmic in the sport. Many of us rabid, blubbering fans were demanding at the time that the game not take so long, among other schemes we'd hatched to make America's pastime unrecognizable to the previous generation.