Happy Wednesday, Athletics Nation!
Professional baseball has been tinkering with ways to shorten games in recent years to appeal to the 21st Century attention span. Generally it is minor league baseball that serves as the test laboratory for experiments with pitch clocks and limitations on mound step-offs and pickoff attempts. Jeff Passan at ESPN reported yesterday that pitch clocks have been shaving about 20 minutes on average from MiLB games this spring, which may set the stage for implementation in the big leagues in 2023.
The minor league season began with a control set of 335 games without a pitch clock, and 132 games have been played since then with a 14-second clock during at-bats with the bases empty and an 18-second clock with runners on base.