MLB players need to take ownership of the slow pace

Analytics show games are getting longer and longer, Barry Svrluga says.

By now, trudging toward the midway point of this Major League Baseball season, we have been well-versed on the reasons games are taking longer than ever before. Pitchers throw harder. Batters swing for the fences, and they miss a lot. Fewer balls are in play. Both sides take longer to prepare for each pitch.

Hello, average game time: three hours eight minutes, longest ever.

Yet all of those considerations leave something that seems rather obvious unconsidered. Advanced analytics have provided us with more ways to analyze and enjoy the game than ever before. So much is quantifiable, including the fact there’s more time between pitches — 23.8 seconds — than at any point in the decade since Pitch-Fx has been recording such data, and the indispensable website FanGraphs has been sharing it with any member of the public who cares to click. Velocity, swing rates, batting average on balls in play, we know it all.

The aspect that can’t be quantified by such numbers: the brain.

“We want them to stay in their three-foot world,” said Charlie Maher, director of psychological services for the Cleveland Indians.

Staying in their three-foot world means focusing on the pitcher’s rubber or the batter’s box. But people such as Maher, who has decades’ worth of experience working with baseball players in maximizing their mental performance, allow that such a pursuit takes time.

Athletes often talk about slowing the game down so they can better process the information — the circumstances — with which they’re presented. But what if by slowing the game down for themselves, they’re slowing it down for everyone?

There’s no way this can’t be true, and it’s fixable, at least to a degree.

Mental coaching, sports psychology — whatever label you give it, there’s no denying it has been on the rise in baseball, not to mention other sports, over the past generation. It would be silly to think that, if this has an impact on individual players or teams, that it doesn’t have an impact on the sport as a whole.

Let’s walk through what Maher and others have tried to instil in players. The Indians and other teams use an acronym: MAC. The M is for mindfulness.

“It’s learning how to centre yourself,” Maher said. “The moment is what you have.”

The A follows, and it’s for acceptance.

“As they compete, things happen during the game,” Maher said. “Instead of saying, ‘What the hell’s going on? I shouldn’t have thrown that pitch,’ let it go.” The C means commit. “Commit to the next pitch,” Maher said. “Stay in the moment, relax get the job done.”

MLB suggests the time to deliver a pitch when no one’s on base, and the batter’s in the box, should be 12 seconds.

But all this information doesn’t come in a streamlined package. We have read about all the factors players are evaluating as they approach a pitch from either side.

Some players also clear their minds by tapping a certain spot on the rubber or redoing their batting gloves.

“If you don’t know what else to do, and you have 10 to 12 seconds to turn yourself around, do something that’s very cheap, very economical,” Maher said. “That’s deep breathing. What that does for them, it centres them. It slows things down for them.”

For them — what about the rest of us?