The latest in MLB’s never-ending obsession with speeding up the game takes the form of shortening the strike zone and turning intentional walks from four lobs into a signal to just advance the batter and any applicable runners.

MLB has revised its strike-zone rules sporadically over the years, often to clarify but sometimes to make fundamental changes to the zone. The last change came 20 years ago, when the league shifted the bottom of the zone from the middle of the knee to the hollow under it. Of course, was this to increase offense? Decrease it? Neither. It was ... (drumroll please) ... to shorten the lengths of games.


We’ve now gone from expanding the strike zone to shorten the lengths of games, to shrinking the strike zone to shorten the lengths of games. Here’s the thing, though: Is it really necessary?

No, It’s Not Necessary.

First, MLB has attracted an average of at least 30,000 fans per game since 2004, and this isn’t due to brevity. I understand MLB not wanting its players to dawdle on the field, but at the same time, any dawdling will not affect whether people enjoy the game.


Case in point: The NFL. The Wall Street Journal studied broadcasts of four NFL games in 2013 and found that, during a game, the average amount of time spent with the ball in play equals roughly 11 minutes. This is despite the games themselves lasting three hours and 12 minutes on average — eight minutes longer than the average big-league ballgame from the same year.

As for baseball, there is no long-term correlation between attendance and time of play. I looked at every season between 2006 and 2015 and found no consistency. Now if MLB’s talking about attracting eyes to games on television, a compact, efficient contest does not make a difference. People are watching more frequently than ever anyway. What lures people to their sets for a ballgame are aspects like tradition, whether any stars are playing, and any other drama, and the likely most important factor: how good their team is.


It’s really this simple: If you want to attract youth to the game, win. Baseball’s winning teams attract kids like they’re made of cotton candy and Justin Bieber. A whole generation of kids in Kansas City is hooked to the Royals now, and probably for the rest of their lives. Want to know why? It isn’t due to the Outfield Experience. By the way, a regular-season game last year involving the eventual world champions took two hours, 59 minutes, and drew 33,439 fans — 12 minutes longer than in 2005, when they lost 106 games and drew 16,928.

“What’s taking them so long?” — Literally nobody in this picture (Photo courtesy of TheBigLead.com


Anyway, as for the strike zone, I don’t see how adjusting the zone will make any difference. In fact, wouldn’t logic hold that throwing into a smaller strike zone would actually make the game longer? Think of it like this:



The smaller the strike zone, the harder it is for a pitcher to throw a strike; The harder it is to throw a strike, the more likely a pitcher is to walk a batter; The more likely a pitcher is to walk a batter, the more likely a batter is to reach base; The more baserunners there are, the more plate appearances there are; The more plate appearances there are, the longer a game takes.



If you give a mouse a cookie, it’s gonna need some milk, and then suddenly the walk rate shoots up and the commissioner’s office is all clueless as to why games are longer; next thing you know, they’re assigning time limits to every action on the field.


There’s a solution, one that both MLB and its fans will appreciate.

Enforce The Current Strike Zone

There is nothing wrong with the current zone. You don’t hear batters or managers complaining about “the goddamn hollow beneath the knee.” If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it, and if you want to tweak it, don’t break it in the process. Shortening the zone would do just that.


If you want a more active strike zone, here’s an idea:

Call the high strike!

In terms of pet peeves when it comes to how baseball is played, this is near the top of the list. Umpires don’t like to call the high strike. MLB rules state the upper limit of the strike zone is, “a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants.” Meanwhile, umpires have long tended to have an unofficial upper limit of roughly the top of the pants. That’s roughly a foot’s worth of strike zone, unrecognized.


MLB has tried to mandate that umpires call the high strike, most notably in 2001, but to no avail. Umpires would do it for a little bit and then get right back into old habits. This presents three problems: First, and this is my big bugaboo, is that umpires aren’t doing their job correctly, though I suppose that at least they’re consistent in this regard, so there’s that. Second, if you’re not going to have the high strike, change the rule to get rid of it (Note to MLB: Don’t do this). Third, and this is MLB’s big bugaboo, is that it makes games longer, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.

More called strikes mean more swings; it means more action. More swings also likely means quicker outs, which keeps the game moving, since that’s what MLB seems to care about more than anything else. Personally, I very much like a larger strike zone. It makes the game more interesting because of the potential increase in action. That said, if umpires refuse to call it, it’s time for MLB to either fish or cut bait here: Mandate that umpires call it, or eliminate the rule. This gray area is just frustrating. That said, if they shorten the zone, they risk lengthening games.


If MLB really wanted to go gung-ho with the strike zone to speed up games, it’d enact a Vladimir Guerrero, nose-to-toes strike zone. I’m not saying it should. I’m just saying that the pace would speed way the hell up then.

The Intentional What?

I don’t get why this blue-ribbon committee of rule-changers decided to do away with the four-pitch intentional walk. Now I don’t like the intentional walk as it is, but that’s not because it’s four wasted pitches or one wasted minute or whatever inefficiency that MLB sees here. I don’t like it because it’s a copout.


That said, I recognize why the intentional walk exists. If you’re pitching with a one-run lead in the 8th inning, there’s runners on second and third, only one out, and Paul Goldschmidt’s stepping up to the plate ... yeah, you’re going to want to take your chances with Jake Lamb instead.

This new proposal that someone (Pitcher? Catcher? Manager? Batboy?) can just signal for a free pass takes all of the risk out of it. This shouldn’t even be called a walk — it’d be a fundamental redefinition of the term. If you’re going to have this, literally call it a “free pass.”


But let’s go back to the risk part of this. Joe Maddon made a point that, in eliminating the pitching portion of the intentional walk, it also eliminates, “the potential that a wild pitch could occur that could impact the game. And I’ve seen it happen.” Crazy things can and do occur during intentional walks. Right, Miguel Cabrera?

In removing the process of the intentional walk, MLB is fixing a problem that did not require fixing, while also removing action from the game. However, if the league really wants to speed up the game, keep the intentional walk, but enforce a 30-second limit from the moment the first pitch is thrown to the moment the fourth pitch is caught.




Even then, though, since 1998*, there has been less than one intentional walk every two games. In fact, the rate of intentional walks has noticeably dropped in recent years, to the point that, since 2013, there’s been roughly one every two-and-a-half games. This means that, if we’re talking about speeding things up, shouldn’t MLB really focus on something that actually happens frequently enough to slow the game down?

* = I only went back to 1998 because, admittedly, I didn’t want to compute this all night, and given that the number of games in a season has been relatively consistent since expansion in 1998, it seemed like a safe stopping point for the sake of argument, and it demonstrates the currency of the trend.


Or, Change The Advertising Structure ... Aw, Who Am I Kidding?

Let’s look back to 1947, the first year Baseball-Reference.com has average game times listed. A relatively quick computation shows us that games, when rounded up, lasted an average of two hours, 12 minutes — significantly less than today.


A large part of this is due to the fact that baseball was not regularly televised until 1949 (and even then it was fairly sporadic and inconsistent for several years due to the owners’ fear that televising games could lose them revenue). Games were broadcast on radio, and back then, the games usually had one lone over-arching sponsor (here’s a 1950 contest, brought to you by Post Cereals!). The broadcaster rarely left the booth, serving as the bridge between innings, with usually no more than a minute and a half passing between the final out of one half-inning and the first pitch of the next. Television adopted this process for its first several years as well, until both media discovered the market for small chunks of airtime.

Today, every between-inning commercial break is two minutes and 25 seconds long for local broadcasts and 2:45 for national ones. Now remember that there are at least 16 of these for every nine-inning game, and then factor in commercial breaks during calls to the bullpen. We have at least — at the very least — an added 15 minutes right there. This doesn’t even factor the transition to commercial after the final out of the inning, which is another 5-10 seconds. Multiply that by 16 and we have another couple of minutes. Add in time that MLB personnel allow after a play to show a replay, and you start seeing how this time adds on there.


Now this doesn’t bother me at all — I quite enjoy watching baseball myself — but clearly it bothers The Powers That Be.

Thus, if MLB really cares that much about speeding up games, and it has continuously demonstrated that it has, it can always limit commercial breaks to 1:30 and consider not going to commercial during trips to the bullpen. It can attempt to make up for this lost time by sponsoring more gimmicks in the game, perhaps having a company logo in a corner of the screen, doing what soccer does and chroma-keying logos onto the field, stuff like that. You know how all the teams put a logo behind the mound? Why not change that to a chroma-key logo?


Of course MLB will absolutely never go for cutting commercial breaks. It’s all about the ad revenue. In fact, that’s why they want to speed up the game — they think that keeping it efficient could help keep viewers, who in turn help keep sponsor money coming. So they’ll never sacrifice commercial breaks for all the alternatives I suggested in the above paragraph. Don’t get me wrong; every alternative will eventually be incorporated into the game, but it’ll be done without a consideration of shortening the breaks. It’s all about ad revenue. MLB is a business first and foremost, and as idealistic as I can be, I don’t begrudge its owners and operators for trying to make money. That’s their goal here.

So What Should Really Be Done?

More than anything, call the high strike. I don’t care about pace of play at all, but even if you do, this should help. It’s really the ideal solution. It makes the game more interesting, and it will speed things up.


Basically, MLB should take a look at its list of proposals, comprehend what is written, and then do the exact opposite.

Josh Murphy does not care at all about baseball games being too slow, because why would anyone argue with the notion of having more time to savor something you enjoy? If you’re bored at a game, bring a friend.