PORT ST. LUCIE — When you execute a gut renovation, you start with the ugliest item and go from there, right?
Good riddance, excessive mound visits.
Baseball’s pace-of-play endeavor has miles to go before it sleeps, and before its current product stops putting young fans to sleep. Yet Monday marked a day of progress and optimism about both speeding up the game and the players and owners working in tandem, if not quite signing “Kumbaya My Lord” together.
Major League Baseball announced a modest number of changes, collectively bargained with the Players Association, that will go into play for the 2018 season. Perhaps what’s notable is what’s not in this agreement: No pitch clocks quite yet. After a winter filled with rancor surrounding these alterations and the alarmingly slow market for free agents, commissioner Rob Manfred signed off on an agreement without that feature.
Yet does anything prompt patrons to check the time more than those endless mound visits? From now on, there will be a limit of six per game by any coach or player, not including managers’ visits to change pitchers and excepting injury situations, pinch-hitters and weather issues (like cleaning spikes). With each extra inning, a team will gain a visit. An umpire may allow more if he is convinced that a pitcher and catcher are experiencing a cross-up in signals, the cause of many visits. Let’s hope the umps aren’t too forgiving on that front.
While MLB will not mandate the tracking of mound visits on ballpark scoreboards, at least some teams are expected to keep an updated tab on the scoreboard.
The league came up with six because teams averaged six mound visits per game in 2017. Just for some perspective, the Astros visited the mound nine times in the first five innings of World Series Game 7 last year. It’ll be a relief for action to move more swiftly.
“Obviously, to gain an edge in any part of the game, you have to prepare,” Mets manager Mickey Callaway said Monday at First Data Field. “And if we can prepare our catchers and pitchers and their communication better than other teams, maybe we won’t get confused like other teams. We can get an edge because of that rule.”
While the union signed off on this, it released a statement from executive director Tony Clark reading, “Players were involved in the pace-of-game discussion from Day One, and are committed to playing a crisp and exciting brand of baseball for the fans, but they remain concerned about rule changes that could alter the outcome of games and the fabric of the game itself — now or in the future.”
Yeesh. Not quite a ringing endorsement.
While the other changes don’t appear as impactful, MLB will take what it can get. They include:
- Inning breaks (2:05 for locally televised games, 2:25 in nationally televised games and 2:55 in tiebreaker and postseason games) will be enforced more diligently by umpires. A pitcher must throw his last warmup pitch, and a batter must leave the on-deck circle, with 20 seconds left on the between-innings clock. Players who “consistently or flagrantly violate the time limits,” as per MLB’s press release, will be fined.
- Teams’ replay technology will be updated to expedite their challenge process.