Longtime San Francisco Giants broadcaster Mike Krukow has a rather outside-the-box idea to help fix baseball's pace of play issues.

Pace of play has become a hot-button topic this winter, and commissioner Rob Manfred took some steps to curb the issue this week by implementing a maximum of six mound visits per game. It remains to be seen whether that will help speed up nine-inning baseball games a season after the average length of an MLB contest rose by nearly four-and-a-half minutes from 2016.

If baseball purists weren't riled up enough by the limitations on mound conferences - let alone the thought of pitch clocks gracing ballparks across the continent - Krukow's brainchild will get those folks seething: He believes the solution is placing advertisements on uniforms.

"I don't like long innings during the playoffs, where there's (a) two-minute, 45-second break," Krukow told KNBR's "Tolbert & Lund" on Wednesday. "... To me, it's obvious. If you want to speed things up, cut the (inning breaks) back down to two minutes or 1:45 and put advertisements on the uniforms. I have no problem with that. I didn't have a problem wearing a rum advertisement when I played in Puerto Rico."

Advertisements on baseball uniforms would certainly break with tradition, but it wouldn't be a first for a major North American professional sport. The NBA became the first league on the continent to place ads on jerseys this season.

Essentially, Krukow is reasoning that by selling additional advertisements on uniforms, MLB would collect enough profit to rationalize shortening inning breaks - a move that would drastically cut into the amount of TV ad time the league could sell.

Manfred mused about the possibility of shortening commercial breaks last year, but the idea doesn't seem to have gained any more traction.

Aside from his advertising ideas, Krukow - who pitched in the majors for 14 years before turning to broadcasting - is a fan of limiting mound visits as a move to speed things up.

"The limited mound visits, I think that's fine," Krukow said. "Allowing the umpires to use common sense and discretion should they need to have a seventh or an eighth (visit). I don't like it when I see pitching coaches go out there two and three and four times. It's just absurd, and it messes with the rhythm of the game."