Up until opening day, I was wondering what to do with all the extra time that Major League Baseball’s new “Pace of Play” rules were supposed to free up. The commissioner’s office and the rules committee wanted to move the game along faster, presumably to appeal to baseball fans with lots of other demands on their attention. So managers now have only 30 seconds to decide if they’re going to challenge a play, and replay “officials” must decide the outcome within two minutes. Most controversially, the intentional walk is now automatic: No need to watch the pitches sail high and wide, just trot to first base.
I figure that the classic four-pitch intentional walk averages about a minute and a half. I’m estimating it takes a minute to throw the four balls and adding another 30 seconds, since maybe 20 percent of intentional walks are preceded by a visit to the mound, where the pitching coach or manager decides to walk the batter. Let’s say there’s one intentional walk a game, though I acknowledge that might be high.
After all, Cubs ace Jon Lester has averaged only one intentional walk per 79 starts, or four during the 318 games he has appeared in over the course of his career. Max Scherzer of my hometown Washington Nationals averages one intentional walk in every 24 starts.
Of course, tactics change when the relief pitchers come in, as managers are more likely to tinker with matchups and more apt to walk runners intentionally. So I’m comfortable with estimating one intentional pass per game. With 2,430 games (162 games multiplied by 30 big league clubs) over the course of a season, that comes out to 3,645 minutes, or two and a half days. So, the new intentional walk rule is worth one long weekend a year.
But just as I was wondering how best to spend the long Intentional Walk Holiday weekend—exploiting my MLB.TV subscription or visiting a ballpark I’d never seen before, like PNC in Pittsburgh—the season opened and I saw the new rule in action. And now I’m worried.
The Anaheim club was playing in Oakland and Angels superstar Mike Trout doubled to lead off the eighth. With Albert Pujols coming to the plate, the Oakland club chose to put the right-handed slugger on base, to set up the double-play with runners on first and second.
I’ll let Trout take it from here with his postgame account. “I called timeout, got back to the bag, and when I looked up, he was on first base,” Trout said. “It was different. He was laughing. I was laughing. It took me a little bit to figure out what happened. But that’s the way it’s going, I guess.”
No wonder Trout laughed nervously. Everything slows down for the superstars, who can see the stitches on a hard slider traveling upwards of 90 mph when they’re at the plate, and in the field hear the crack of the bat and know instantly where the ball is going. And Trout sees where this is going.
Let me elaborate. Cardinals starter Adam Wainwright wondered recently on Twitter who would be the first major league pitcher to throw a two-pitch inning. Say the leadoff hitter swings at the first pitch and flies out. The team in the field signals for the number two hitter to take first base, without a pitch, and then the number three hitter grounds into an inning-ending double-play on one pitch.
It gets worse, much worse. Let’s say that the “Pace of Play” initiative eventually incorporates the extra-inning protocol, now used in some of the minor leagues, where beginning with the 11th inning, the team at bat starts the inning with runners on first and second. Imagine that the team in the field gives an intentional walk to the leadoff batter to load the bases. The next hitter then grounds into a 5-4-3 triple play. That would be a one-pitch inning.
Or let’s imagine the same setup. It’s the bottom of the 11th and the pitcher balks with the bases loaded, and the runner on third comes home with the game-winning run. That’s right, a no-pitch inning.
The no-pitch inning, and the eventual disappearance of pitches altogether, would be one of the signs of the apocalypse, presaging the end of baseball. The new intentional walk rule isn’t speeding up baseball or saving time—it’s creating a black hole that may well suck in the game itself. That’s what Mike Trout saw, and it rattled him. It should alarm us all.
