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The Importance Of Speeding Up America's Pastime

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Speeding Up America’s Pastime For years Major League Baseball has tried to keep fans engaged while watching their teams play. One element of the game that has always caused an issue in this goal is how long a baseball game last. The average time for a baseball game is around 3 hours and according to a Wall Street Journal study only 18 minutes of that is live action. The MLB has gradually been making changes to rules that attempt to increase the speed of the game, one example is limiting the occasions when a batter can step outside of the batters box, but the improvements have been slow and gradual. In order the greatly increase the speed of games and lessen then amount of downtime during games the MLB should change the strike rules so a batter can strike …show more content…

Currently there is no rule that limits the amount of time a pitcher can take in between pitches, and therefore every pitch can take as long as wanted. A pitcher can step off the bag at anytime or peek over at the first base runner without any consequences. If the MLB instituted a 20 second pitch clock then the game would see an immediate decrease in total game time and the amount of dead-ball time. This rule has already been experimented with in the Arizona Fall League and the results were that the average game decreased in time by 11 minutes. These 11 minutes are only being cut by using a pitch clock, so this change when compounded with the other recommended changes can lead to an even high amount of minutes being shaved off of games. The game of baseball is America’s national pastime, and continues to be one of the major sports of North America. Major League Baseball must adapt to the changing times in order to increase the games popularity. Giving fans more action and less down-time while watching games is a first step towards making baseball America’s top sport again, and these rule changes seek to increase the pace of play and lessen dead-ball

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