Rockin' Around the Clock
The MLB's new pitch clock is a model of successful reform. Plus, Daniel Snyder's downfall.
Dear readers,
As we mentioned last week, the two of us officially kicked off the spring season last weekend with a trip to Citi Field for our first baseball game of the season, a matchup between the New York Mets and the Miami Marlins. It was our first chance to witness live baseball under MLB’s new rule changes, which took effect this year. We weren’t sure how we would feel about these changes — and especially about the cornerstone of the reforms, the implementation of a pitch clock — but the verdict is now officially in: We love it. More on that below.
In other news, we learned this week that Daniel Snyder, Southpaw Enemy #1, has agreed to sell the Washington Commanders for $6 billion to a group led by Josh Harris, an owner of the Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils. (The proposed ownership group also contains — surprise surprise! — Magic Johnson.) We here at Southpaw consider this new a bit of a personal triumph, but also a bit of a bummer — who will become our next bête noire?
On the whole, however, Snyder’s downfall isn’t such bad news for him. As others pointed out this week, his rise and fall confirm our Unified Theory of Sports Ownership: That even when you royally fuck it up, you still get richer.
-Calder and Ian
In the world of baseball, “reform” is generally a dirty word. Dispositionally, most baseball fans resemble Michael Oakeshott’s archetypical conservative: they prefer the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. In the secretly reactionary mind of every baseball fan, reform is change, and change is bad.
But baseball fans’ abiding suspicion of reform isn’t just a function of their innate traditionalism; it is also a purely rational response to the fact that the majority of the reforms that Major League Baseball has tried to ram down fans’ throats in recent years have been complete and total bunk. Reducing the number of mound visits? Bunk. Mandating that relief pitchers face three batters? Bunk. Quietly tinkering with the physical characteristics of the ball itself? Bunk bunk bunk bunk.
So fans — the two of us included — were justifiably skeptical when we learned that the Major Leagues were finally adopting a reform that had been whispered about for years: the 20-second pitch clock. Under this new rule, pitchers have 15 seconds from the time they receive the ball to begin their wind-up, or 20 seconds if there are men on base. If pitchers have not begun their delivery by the time the clock strikes zero, the batter is awarded an automatic ball.
The nominal purpose of the pitch clock is to speed up the “pace of play,” a perennial obsession of MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred. Now, long-time readers of the newsletter will know that we are not particularly fond of Mr. Manfred, whose primary preoccupations, aside from making baseball games shorter, have been screwing over the MLBPA and enriching himself and the league’s owners. But at least when it comes to pace of play issues, Manfred has had a point: In 2021, the average length of a game had crept up to 3.1 hours, and seemed to be getting longer every season. Something needed to be done — and Manfred did it.
Empirically speaking, the pitch clock has been an unequivocal success. On average, the clock has shaved about half an hour off of games so far this season, with the average game on Opening Day clocking in around 2:45, as opposed to 3:11 in 2022. But even more importantly, baseball feels faster. In previous years, you could tootle around on your phone a little bit during an at-bat or step out to the concessions stand for a few minutes without missing too much action. But no longer. In fact, the pace of play has increased so much that many ballparks are extending the last call for beer sales from the 7th inning to the 8th inning to give fans more time to imbibe (wasn’t the point of the 7th inning cut-off that they wouldn’t be hammered while driving home? We digress, and recommend public transit to the ballpark anyways).
Its potential impact on beer sales aside, we can confidently say that the pitch clock is a success. It’s a win for fans, who don’t have to block off their entire day to catch a baseball game, and it’s a win for players, who certainly don’t need to drag out their 162-game-long season. But it’s also a massive win for the league itself, which has demonstrated to its fan base that — at least on rare occasions — it is actually able to do something right. It brings us no joy to commend Manfred on his success, but we’ve got to hand it to him: The pitch clock is working.
There is, perhaps, a larger lesson here for our fractious political moment. Everybody knows that trust in government in the U.S. has been declining precipitously since the 1960s, which we’re told has something to do with Watergate, the war in Vietnam, and overall declines in social trust. This decline is often talked about in semi-mystical terms, but the reality is much simpler: most Americans don’t feel like reforms materially improve their lives — and even when those reforms do demonstrably help them, our political leaders do a piss poor job at selling them. A case in point is the Biden administration’s child tax credit, a policy that had the potential to dramatically curtail child poverty in the U.S., but which Congress failed to extend last year — in part because many of the people who most benefited from it didn’t even know that it existed.
The lesson here is that trends in “trust in government” won’t go up because elected officials and their voters get together and sing kumbaya on the National Mall; it’ll go up because officials in Washington adopt policies that materially improve people’s lives in ways that they can’t ignore. If the pitch clock can make us feel good (if only temporarily) about noted villain Rob Manfred, then maybe — just maybe — there’s hope for the Republic.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . FIFA’s latest blunder? “FIFA Shuns Indonesia Over Palestinian Solidarity,” by Dave Zirin and Jules Boykoff in The Nation (April 12, 2023).
. . . the end of Jeff Bezos’ NFL dreams? “Jeff Bezos isn’t planning Commanders bid, clearing path for Josh Harris group,” by Mark Maske and Nicki Jhabvala in The Washington Post (April 12, 2023).
. . . a revisionist take on Michael Jordan’s “activism”? “Michael Jordan Was an Activist After All,” by Harvey Araton in The New York Times (April 13, 2023).
. . . an abuse scandal in women’s soccer? “Shadow of Abuse Scandal Hangs Over a World Cup Soccer Team,” by Jere Longman in The New York Times (April 11, 2023).