M.L.B.’s New Rules Have Baseball in Overdrive

Nearly two months into baseball’s pitch-clock era, you sometimes wonder how the sport ever got so slow. Why did we endure standstill traffic on a ride that could have been much smoother?

“It was Red Sox/Yankees — a lot of people in these parts, they certainly know about that,” Scott Servais, the manager of the Seattle Mariners, said with a smile last week before a game at Fenway Park in Boston. “I mean, it was four hours every night. Just a regular 4-2 game was 3 hours and 40 minutes. It’s sped up things a lot.”

The game Servais’s team played that night would not evoke the prose of Angell or Updike. Mariners pitchers allowed 12 runs and 16 hits, while Red Sox pitchers issued eight walks.…