When MLB announced that they were introducing new rules to increase the pace of games, one player – shall we call him a serial offender – particularly came to mind as a cause of the changes.
David Ortiz may be loved by Boston Red Sox fans, but to many others he’s the frustrating guy who wanders around after every pitch and goes through his annoying ritual of adjusting and then spitting on his gloves. It all has an air of self-importance: I’m David Ortiz and I can do what I like, everyone else can wait for me.
So, it was no surprise to learn that he isn’t exactly thrilled by the new rules and equally no shock that he has expressed his views on them in a typically blunt way.
However, I do think he has a valid point.
As reported on ESPN.com, Ortiz stated that his in-between pitch parade is not about getting himself some TV time but actually about giving himself some thinking time.
“When you come out of the box, they don’t understand you’re thinking about what the [pitcher] is trying to do. This is not like, you go to the plate with an empty mind. No, no, no. When you see a guy, after a pitch, coming out of the box, he’s not just doing it. Our minds are speeding up.
“I saw one pitch, I come out, I’m thinking, ‘What is this guy going to try to do to me next?’ I’m not walking around just because there are cameras all over the place and I want my buddies back home to see me and this and that. It doesn’t go that way”.
One of the major talking points around MLB at the moment is the decrease in run scoring and potentially reducing a hitter’s ability to think about his craft is not going to help address that issue.
The important thing to consider though is how the new rules will work in practice. ESPN’s Jayson Stark has written a very useful summary on this based on what’s coming out of the briefings that MLB are giving coaches.
This is going to be a gradual transition, with umpires taking informal action and relatively small fines issued for repeat offenders. Initially it was rumoured that the pace of game changes would be more aggressive: clocks counting down every act, a transgression from a pitcher or hitter being punished by a strike or ball depending on the offender.
Getting games to move along a bit more quickly is fair enough, but I don’t think the problem is anywhere near big enough to warrant such significant changes. Former MLB Commissioner Bud Selig liked to talk about a slow game putting fans off, yet I never saw much hard evidence supporting the view.
The primary reason for games taking longer and longer is not down to the players but down to the TV companies wanting to squeeze as many advert minutes into the nine innings as possible. You can’t blame them as they are paying huge sums to acquire the rights, so need to make a return on their investment, and MLB and the teams have to accept that if they want the big TV contracts, they sacrifice the pace of the game. It’s up to them to find a balance and at the moment it’s easier just to heap the blame on the players.
As with the new instant replay rules introduced in 2014, we’ll have to wait and see how the changes actually impact things before making a firm judgement on them.
What we do know from Stark’s article is that, initially at least, Ortiz and his fellow hitters will still be able to think about their at-bat (and spit on their gloves) so long as they keep at least one foot in the batter’s box.
And maybe after sitting through zoomed-in, slow-mo replays of Ortiz’s foot edging precariously close to the line of the batter’s box we might end up thinking watching him walking around wasn’t quite so painful after all.