With a first-inning violation, league steps up to start its pitch clock era
In the first PEORIA, ARIZ. — inning of a spring training game against the Seattle Mariners here on Friday, San Diego Padres third baseman Manny Machado placed his left foot in the batter’s box, tapped his bat on home plate and twirled it around before coming set. It is a routine he has done countless times.
But in this case, Machado was out of time. Ryan Blakney, the home plate umpire, stood up from his crouch, pointed to Machado and then his left wrist to signal the first pitch clock infraction in Major League Baseball history — albeit one that came in an exhibition game.
Under a set of new rules intended to speed up the game and inject more activity, there will now be a 30-second clock between batters. Once an at-bat has begun, pitchers will have 15 seconds to start their motion with the bases empty or 20 seconds if there is a runner on base.
Batters, though, have their own regulations. They must be in the batter’s box and looking at the pitcher with eight seconds left on the clock. Machado was ready with roughly six seconds remaining. So, before he could even see a pitch or swing the bat, he was already down one strike in the count.
“That time goes by fast,” Machado said after the 3-2 loss. He joked later, “We’re in the record books at least.”
Spring training, after all, is practice. The 2023 regular season begins on March 30, so the next five weeks are not only for pitchers to build up their arm strength and for batters to hone their timing but also for everyone — from umpires to coaches to players — to adjust to some of the biggest single-season rule changes in the sport’s history.
“It’s going to be an interesting year for sure,” Machado said.
Over the decades, MLB games have grown longer and, for a variety of reasons, featured less action. The average game time in 2021 set a record at three hours 11 minutes while in 1976, for example, the average game took two hours 29 minutes. MLB’s overall batting average last season was .243, the lowest it has been since 1968, according to Baseball Reference. Strikeout rates have risen to record highs in recent years.
So as part of the collective bargaining agreement between MLB’s team owners and its players’ union before the 2022 season, the sides agreed to an 11-person committee — which featured players but was controlled by M.L.B. — that tackled rules changes. The result for 2023: adding a pitch clock, banning defensive shifts and increasing the size of the bases.
“The first weeks of spring training will be an adjustment period, and it’s our intent to change the behavior as quickly as we can,” said Morgan Sword, who oversaw the rule-book tweaks as MLB’s executive vice president of baseball operations. He, along with other MLB executives, descended upon the Peoria Sports Complex in the Phoenix area on Friday to watch one of the first games this spring training.
They expect games to look more like they did in the 1970s and ’80s: more stolen bases, more hits, more athleticism on the field.
“I think you’re going to see a game that moves along with more pace,” MLB. Commissioner Rob Manfred said. “I think you’re going to see more balls in play. I think you’re going to look at the field and see players in positions the way that most of us grew up seeing them positioned. I really do think they’re going to see a movement toward the very best form of our game.”
The Mariners and the Padres provided glimpses of what might be coming. During his two innings, Padres starting pitcher Nick Martinez, a relatively quickpaced pitcher who takes longer when runners are on base, delivered most pitches with several seconds remaining on the clock. But the clock got dangerously close to zero on a few.
“I had to speed up,” Martinez said after the game. “I thought I was not even going to think about it today, and I was definitely conscious of it.” He added later: “There are times where I like to kind of slow the game down, so that’ll be interesting. Those happen more in the season because there’s more on the line.”
But, in turn, Martinez said he also noticed batters hurrying to get into place. When leading off the game, Kolten Wong, the Mariners second baseman, stepped entirely out of the batter’s box but quickly hopped back in and was ready with one second to spare.