Since taking office as the commissioner of Major League Baseball in January 2015, Rob Manfred has waged a war against the game’s slowing pace of play. It is a war he seems to be losing.



The average major-league game lasted three hours and 10 minutes in 2019, breaking the record set in 2017. The number of pitches required to complete the average plate appearance reached a record high in each of the last four years, topping out at 3.93 pitches per plate appearance last year. The frequency of balls in play reached a record low for the eighth year in a row in 2019, with nearly a third of all plate appearances failing to produce a fair ball.



The clear culprit in the latter two cases is the ever-increasing strikeout rate. Yet rather than make a common-sense adjustment to the strike zone that would align with historical precedent and address the problem head-on, MLB has opted for rule changes, and their intrusion upon in-game strategy has been increasingly out of...