Major League Baseball and the Players Association agreed last week to change the intentional walk protocol so that the pitcher will no longer actually have to throw the four pitches that had been required. The reason? After some progress in speeding up the “pace of play,” baseball experienced a regression in 2016, as the average length of a game increased by four minutes. Under this new rule, the manager of the pitching team will simply point and the umpire will then award first base to the hitter. No mess.

The purists, and even the semi-purists, are grumbling about this change. For them, the idea of awarding a base to a hitter without a pitch even being thrown is at a minimum blasphemy, and at worst apocalyptic. We are putting the spiritual sanctity of the game at risk, maybe even tempting the end of days from a fiery comet etched in speedup rules.

Yet there are many who agree that the intentional walk never lived up to the artistry of baseball. A game would have to shift from the crescendo of a top-performing hitter stepping up to the plate in a crucial situation, the spectators being excited or horrified (depending on which side they were rooting for) by the possibility of what he might do, to the deflating reality that the pitcher was ordered to not indulge him. The intentional walk was born of the idea that we can avoid pain and suffering at the hands of a feared hitter by simply not giving him the chance to inflict damage. We can “walk” him.

But since he is not a Boston terrier, we needed to throw those extraneous four pitches as a pretense that we were still playing the game, as opposed to hitting the pause button and secretly moving chess pieces around while the audience dozed off. After all, there was always the possibility that the pitcher could slip up and leave one over the plate, which the batter could then send to Trappist-1. So we let the pitcher offer up his four paper airplanes, and claimed that we were keeping the game moving, albeit glacially.