Pitch clock and limits on mound visits looming

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

“It’s slow. It’s boring,” the 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.

Union head Tony Clark has said information was being gathered from players and he expects to discuss the proposals with management this summer.

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.

The leagues with the clocks cut 12 minutes from their average game time from 2014 to 2015, double the 6-minute overall drop in the minors.

But times have crept back up. After dropping from 2:56 in 2014 to 2:40 in the International League in the first year, the average rose to 2:42 last year and 2:49 this season. The Pacific Coast League fell from 2:58 in 2014 to 2:45, then rose to 2:48 and 2:53.

Part of the rise may be attributable to an increased number of pitches — and pitchers. In the major leagues, teams have added hard-throwing relievers and subtracted bench players. Teams combined to use 8.30 pitchers per game last year, up from 7.26 in 2002. This year’s average is 8.21 — and it climbs during the second half, especially after active rosters expand from 25 to 40 on Sept. 1.

Sabathia remembered how frustrated he got when he switched to a Red Sox game on television this year.

“I was watching between a commercial break of a basketball game,” he said, “and I only saw two pitches.”