Baseball America: Pitch clock speeding up minor league games

[Otto von Ballpark]

9 minutes ago, DJL44 said:

If the batter is in the box, point to the pitcher and tell him to throw the pitch. If the batter's head is down he'll miss it.

If the batter's head is down, he's at risk of getting beaned. And the pitcher isn't looking at a clock, he's preparing to delivery his pitch based on the batter's visual readiness. If the ump tells the pitcher to suddenly deliver a pitch in that situation, they'd feel rushed and I'd guess most pitchers would choose not to. Then what does the ump do? Assign a ball to the pitcher? Or just let the whole thing go?

It is much easier, safer, and more effective for the ump to simply call an automatic ball or strike (which is what the rule book already allowed, but umps were loath to enforce).

[Otto von Ballpark]

Oh, and the obligatory required reading on the subject -- a comparison of near-identical games from 1984 and 2014:

Why Baseball Games Are So Damned Long

Quote

There were 146 inaction pitches in the 1984 game.

There were 144 of these pitches in the 2014 game.

The total time for the inaction pitches in 1984 — the elapsed time between a pitcher releasing one pitch and his release of the next pitch — was 32 minutes and 47 seconds.

The total time for inaction pitches in 2014 was 57 minutes and 41 seconds.

This is how a game can have an almost identical number of pitches thrown, batters faced, baserunners, hits, walks, strikeouts, and runs scored compared to another game, yet take more than a half-hour longer. This, plus the modest difference in commercial breaks, explains nearly everything. It took nine seconds longer for a pitcher to get rid of the ball in 2014.