Officials want to speed things up in 2018

NEW YORK — Count CC Sabathia as a fan who wants to speed up baseball games. When the six-time All-Star tunes in at home, he quickly changes the channel.

“It’s slow. It’s boring,” the New York Yankees pitcher said. “Man, it’s so hard to watch if you have no interest in it.”

The average time of a nine-inning game this season is a record 3 hours, 5 minutes — up from an even 3 hours last year and 2:56 in 2015. Management proposed three changes last offseason the union didn’t accept, and MLB has the right to start them next year without player approval: restricting catchers to one trip to the mound per pitcher each inning, employing a 20-second pitch clock and raising the bottom of the strike zone from just beneath the kneecap to its pre-1996 level — at the top of the kneecap.

The 20-second clock is now in its third season in the high minors. It would reset when a pitcher steps off under MLB’s proposal last offseason, but now the league is considering asking that it merely stop and resume. If a pitch isn’t thrown within 20 seconds, a ball would be called. If the hitter isn’t in the batter’s box with 5 seconds remaining, a strike would be called.

Some think no tinkering is needed.

“The rhetoric needs to change from, ‘How do you speed the game up?’ to ‘Let’s just go back to enjoying the game for what it is,’” San Francisco pitcher Jeff Samardzija said. “If we can cut out a little bit of the commercial break, then so be it. But other than that, just buy another beer and enjoy the game.”