A few days ago, reports appeared which indicated that Major League Baseball’s competition committee had agreed to two key changes under the guise of “speeding up the game.”

Intentional walks will not need to be pitched, the pitcher can indicate that he wants to walk the batter, and the batter will be immediately granted first base. The bottom of the strike zone will be raised to the top of the kneecap.

Now, if you’re a big baseball fan, you can already tell off the bat that these two proposals won’t do much, but I did the math to demonstrate it.

First, let’s look at the intentional walks. For the last two years, intentional walks per game has remained pretty steady at around .39, which means that roughly every 5 games, there will be 2 IBBs. Total, not per team. Because I have nothing better to do, I went back to watch every intentional walk in Sunday’s game, a staggering 11, and timed each one:

Game Inning Time Comment LA vs SD B11 0:35 LA vs SD T15 0:35 LA vs SD T17 0:35 LA vs SD T17 0:33 MIA vs WAS T2 0:40 MIA vs WAS T3 0:40 MIA vs WAS T3 0:32 SEA vs CIN T5 0:10 First 2 pitches were unintentional balls SEA vs CIN T9 0:38 DET vs TB B7 0:44 BOS vs CLE B6 0:37

As you can see, it’s almost consistently around 35-40 seconds per intentional walk. The Dodgers-Padres game would’ve shaved two minutes off of its 5:47 total game time. Not a tangible time savings in the grand scheme of things. And besides, it eliminates the possibility of GREAT BASEBALL LIKE THIS:

AND THIS!

All in the effort to save a whopping 45 seconds. Now granted, the odds are low, but the beauty of baseball is that you have to play the game out. Signaling for an intentional walk takes away the minute chance that something goes haywire, but that minute chance ends up changing game outcomes.

Now, onto the strike zone. This has almost nothing to do with speeding up the game. In fact, making the strike zone smaller in any fashion is likely to increase game time as additional walks lead to all the extra time associated with a batter walking up, pitch counts increasing leading to relievers, et cetera. The stated goal of the MLB is that this will increase “action” by making more pitches hittable. While I agree with the idea, pitches will still cross at the knees and be taken for balls, so I’m not certain the game will see any significant shortening.

Okay, so I’ve complained about the proposed measures, you’re surely asking:

What’s your plan then, hot shot?

It’s simple. In fact, it takes some of the measures tested by Major League Baseball in the Arizona Fall League and perhaps even take them a degree farther. And no, I am not talking about pitch clocks. As a purist, the idea of a clock in baseball irks me to my core.

Limit mound visits by a manager per inning, or even per game – They’ve already added a 30 second clock for mound visits. The next logical step is to give a team a certain amount of mound visits per game, in a similar fashion to how challenges are distributed. Largely, the mound visit has become a method of stalling while a reliever gets warm. This is fine in small doses, but it does somewhat significantly increase time of game when it happens so frequently. Shorten the amount of time given to a relief pitcher who enters mid-inning – This could be as extreme as eliminating on-the-mound warmup tosses, to reducing pitches from the current seven, or simply reducing the amount of time the reliever has to warm up (currently 2:30). Alternatively, this could be done only on the second pitching change of a particular half inning. The benefit to any of these proposals are that it offers a negative incentive for managers over-specializing their pitching squad. Alternatively, it rewards managers who are proactive in warming up their relievers to be ready to enter the game. I cannot tell you how many times I have sat at a baseball game that was on pace to finish in 2:30 only to have 5 pitching changes in the last two innings slow the game down to finish in 3:00 or so. Encourage faster walkups – Once the ball is in play, the on-deck batter should be approaching the plate. I know, walk-up music, but spending 20 minutes a game so that you can hear a 10 second snippet of In Da Club is perhaps not the best use of time if the Commissioner wants to speed up the pace of the game.

That’s it. I’m sure there are plenty more areas that can be included, like pitch clocks, but really the problem that exists is almost directly a function of padding the existing process. Ty Cobb never had walkup music, nor were there many pitching changes back then, and games routinely came in under two hours. Of course, the elephant in the room is television, which makes every commercial break a revenue opportunity for the networks, and in turn, baseball.

However, with some small changes, baseball games can easily get their average down to 2:45, or perhaps even 2:30, which is much more in line with other sporting events outside of football. A quicker game will in turn attract more fans, and generate a brighter future for Major League Baseball.

And hopefully a future without pitch clocks.