On Kole Calhoun and Pace of Play

Today, Wednesday March 14, it was announced that for the upcoming season ALL Minor League games at ALL levels will begin extra innings with a man on second base. This is, to put it mildly, a rather significant departure from how the sport of baseball has been played up to this point.

Even before this change was announced, there had been a fairly consistent murmur amongst some baseball fans on the internet that for a guy who is supposed to promote baseball, Commissioner Rob Manfred sure seemed to focus on all of the things he disliked about the sport. Some people, usually on Twitter but not exclusively there, have gone as far as claiming that Rob Manfred hates baseball. These sentiments arise primarily due to Manfred's insistence on shortening the amount of time it takes to complete a game. He refers to it as "pace of play," but the pace at which a game is played and the amount of time it takes for a game to be played are two different things, and to conflate the two is lazy syntax.

In order to shorten the length of games, Manfred has implemented a number of changes. Most of the changes were introduced at the Minor League level first. The most significant of these has been the 20-second pitch clock. It is hard to overstate just how fundamental an alteration to baseball the introduction of a clock is. There are very few sports, anywhere in the world, that do not rely on some sort of timer to determine a winner. Cricket is often held up as one such example, but that is plainly incorrect. Even Test cricket, the kind in which the guys dress all in white and a match can go on for days, still makes use of a timer. Test cricket is played for six hours a day for a maximum of five days. If no winner is determined by the end of the fifth day, the match is declared a draw. If time runs out they don't continue playing, they simply stop. Five days is a long time, but it's still a defined amount of time. That sure sounds like a timer to me. A baseball game, on the other hand, has no such restrictions. You can never run out of time, because there is no timer. As long as your opponent is incapable of making 27 outs, your team has a chance to come back.

By introducing a clock into baseball Rob Manfred didn't just tweak the sport, he altered its DNA. The decision to begin extra innings with a man on second doesn't have quite the same impact, but it's pretty damn big in its own way.

The most frustrating aspect of all of this is that the rules of baseball already provide a clear path for how to shorten the length of games: Rule 5.04. The rule, which is a little over three pages in length, covers what a batter must and must not do once he has entered the batter's box, and it is probably one of the most widely-ignored rules in the entire book. This was made glaringly apparent to me last June, when I randomly turned on a game between the Angels and the Red Sox. (Watching random games is one of the perks of having MLB.tv and living in a place with no blackout restrictions whatsoever.) Having been released by the Angels a few days prior, Doug Fister had signed with Boston and was now facing his old team at Fenway Park, so he was probably a little jacked. Cameron Maybin led off for the Angels and Fister struck him out on three pitches. What stood out to me was how fast Fister was working. I had never really watched him pitch before, but the speed at which he worked was kind of mesmerising. Granted it was only three pitches, but Maybin's at-bat probably lasted no more than 30 seconds, at most. It was cool.

And then Kole Calhoun came up and everything changed. He walked up to the plate slowly. He took his position in the batter's box slowly. To absolutely nobody's surprise he let the first pitch go by without swinging. Keeping one foot in the box he stepped backwards with the other leg and looked around, adjusting his helmet, patting the pine tar on his bat, and finally digging in after about 15 seconds. He swung at the next pitch and fouled it off, so he then stepped out of the box entirely, walked around a little bit, did the whole dance with his helmet and bat, and after about 20 seconds stepped back in. As all this was happening, Fister stood on the mound, the ball in his hand, looking as bored as a man whose back is turned to the camera can look. This went on for another eight pitches before, mercifully, Calhoun walked on pitch number 10 of the at-bat. Maybin's at-bat had taken 30 seconds, Calhoun's had taken the better part of ten minutes.

Now, I know exactly what Calhoun was doing, and given the way the rules of baseball are enforced right now, I can't really blame him. Fister had dominated Maybin in the first at-bat because Maybin had allowed Fister to control the pace of the game. Fister was rushing and Maybin looked rushed as a result. Calhoun, a player who would have fit into the baseball culture of the early-2000s so well that you can't help but think that he was born a decade too late, saw this happen from the on-deck circle and knew that he needed to prevent Fister from controlling the at-bat. So he took his time. And Fister got impatient. And because Fister couldn't do anything about Calhoun's time-wasting, Calhoun won.

But why was Calhoun even in a position to be able to do that? Rule 5.04 is very clear on when a batter is allowed to remove one foot from the batter's box and when he is allowed to leave the batter's box entirely. Section 2(b) of the rule clearly states "The batter shall not leave his position in the batter's box after the pitcher comes to the Set Position, or starts his windup."

Imagine if umpires actually enforced that rule to the letter of the law! Rob Manfred's worries about game time would disappear in an instant.

But, despite lip service about making sure umpires enforce the current rules more strictly, Manfred seems far more enamoured with the idea of changing the very nature of the game itself. I have yet to hear a decent explanation as to why this is. Maybe the people on Twitter are right, and Manfred hates baseball. Or maybe he loves it, and desperately wants to see it regain the wide-spread popularity it used to enjoy. Maybe he's convinced that long games are killing fan interest in the sport, and the only way to save baseball is by killing long games.

But I can't help but feel like the thing Manfred is really killing is the game itself.