Feb. 27--In the 1980s, Cleveland Indians first baseman Mike Hargrove was notorious for his litany of time-consuming habits at the plate. Between pitches, he would tap his cleats with his bat, adjust his batting gloves, straighten his helmet and tug his jersey before finally presenting himself to the pitcher for the task of batting.
Two things worth knowing here: First, Hargrove was so unusual that he was nicknamed "The Human Rain Delay." Second, if he were playing today, he would not stand out in the least. Every lineup has a few human rain delays, if not nine.
If you like studying obsessive-compulsive behavior, such delaying tactics are fascinating. If you go to the ballpark to watch baseball being played, it's a tedious bore, though not the only one. Last year, the average major league game took 3 hours and 2 minutes -- the longest ever, up by nearly half an hour since 1981.
Part of baseball's charm is that unlike most sports, it has no clock. As Colin Grant has written, "In its setting and structure, baseball can be seen to transcend time and open out into eternity." But you can have too much of a good thing. Lately, the typical game seems not to open out into eternity but to resemble it.
So Major League Baseball and the players union deserve credit for agreeing on steps to speed up the pace just a bit. Batters will no longer be able to step out after every pitch. Umpires will start enforcing an old rule that requires hitters to keep one foot in the box, except in certain designated situations.
Some players think it's a bad idea. Miami Marlins pitcher Mat Latos complained, "You're going to rush the game." He might want to go back and watch footage from the 1960s, when batters stayed in the box as though the adjacent ground contained land mines. If that practice was good enough for Sandy Koufax and Hank Aaron, modern players should be able to adapt.
Managers will no longer have to leave the dugout to ask for replay reviews, a new custom that caused delays last season.
Commercial breaks between innings will also be tightened up through the use of countdown clocks posted in each stadium. Pitchers will have to finish warmup throws 30 seconds before the break ends, and batters' walk-up music will be subject to new time constraints. When the time is up, the pitcher had better be dealing.
One option that didn't make the cut is a 20-second clock for each pitch. An experiment reportedly went well in last year's Arizona Fall League, and this year it will expand to the minors. But a timer ticking during actual play should be a last resort at best.
The most obvious waste of time, the leisurely 2 minutes and 25 seconds between innings (2:45 for nationally televised games) won't change. In 2011, the NCAA cut the breaks in televised college games to 108 seconds. Adopting that change would save the bigs more than 10 minutes per game. But MLB is not about to shrink the space for commercials. Guess why.
Some time-consuming elements are not bugs but features. Baseball games would be shorter if hitters didn't work counts, if pitchers didn't make throws to first to hold runners, and if managers didn't make ample use of bullpens. Too bad. Those are important parts of the game, not needless padding.
Baseball doesn't need to be hurried up. It just doesn't need to be stalled, either.
