Baseball's Pitch Clock Has Become a Major Success In The Minor Leagues, Shrinking The Average Time Of Games To Just 2.5 Hours While Not Impacting Anything Else

When baseball first installed the pitch clock in the minor leagues I was skeptical with how players would adapt. You had games ending on batters stepping out of the batters box or pitchers taking too long to thrown a pitch. Pure chaos. As with most things, there was an adjustment period to be had and we're now seeing the overwhelmingly positive results. The games are averaging around two and a half hours with nothing else getting impacted whatsoever. I can't imagine seeing this as anything but a major success. 

I am admittedly one of those nut jobs who loved a marathon game going into the 18th that lasted six hours, but I can see the light. When a game is moving and has a great pace there's nothing like it. Even a three hour game feels lightning fast at this point. The problems occur when you get a game like Yankees-Cardinals a few Sundays ago. We can't have a 9 inning game take 4 hours and 25 minutes. Sure there were a lot of runs and more than a handful of pitching changes, but the pace was just brutal if you were actually watching. Seems to me the pitch clock is going to solve this problem in a big way and I'm all for it. 

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My only question here is how this impacts base stealing. You have to imagine timing out a pitcher becomes a lot easier when they're up against a clock. I'd love to see if there's a big difference with that or nothing at all. 

Something else they've also toyed around with is a pitch challenge system, similar to what you see in tennis. 

That seems like fun and could also expose the shit out of some horrible umpires in the game today. Angel Hernandez, Ed Hickox, Ron Kulpa I'm looking right at you assholes. You get three challenges and if you're right you keep your challenge. Judge might be up there challenging every bullshit low strike called on him. The pitcher, catcher, and hitter are the only ones who can challenge and must do it immediately so it doesn't impact the pace of the game. It's fast and efficient. 

Maybe that's how we incorporate a robotic strike zone? Tennis recently made the switch to make every call automated and some players despise it, not trusting a single call. I can only imagine how that'd blow over with baseball. Maybe the challenge system is the move. Either way, we're making actual strides to make the game a better viewing product for the average fan and I'm all for it.