Calling time

Forget all the noise about whether or not a guy who batted .249 last year and struck out 162 times is going to sign a deal worth more than the GNP of most developed nations (Hint: His initials are "Bryce Harper").  The real news out of baseball this morning involves clock management.

Or, you know, lack of same.

This is because Major League Baseball is on the verge of eighty-sixing the implementation of a pitch clock until at least 2022, and perhaps beyond. This is part of a wider initiative to speed up the pace of play, thereby returning baseball to its roots as a game that stepped along at a lively clip.

As opposed to today, when it so often tends to be what erosion would look like if it were a spectator sport.

The game a lot of us grew up with wasn't like that. Batters weren't refugees from some fashion runway, continually calling time to make sure their batting gloves and wristbands and helmet and hair were just-so. Pitchers didn't spend days contemplating the nature of man before coming set and throwing either to the plate or first base. Managers didn't bring in a reliever to pitch to one batter, and then another reliever to pitch to the next batter, and then another reliever to pitch to the batter after that.

Consequently, nine-inning baseball games did not drag on longer than the Peloponnesian War. Or, you know, longer than two Peloponnesian Wars if it happens to be the Red Sox and Yankees playing.

Old-school baseball types (are there any other, demographically, in 2019?) tend to forget this when they say one of baseball's charms is that it is unbound by time. This is true. But that was never a license to practice the sort of temporal anarchy we see today.  The game's own history and traditions tell us as much.

And so, the pitch clock, a profoundly excellent idea. Ideally it would be unnecessary, because ideally both pitchers and umpires would self-govern. But they either can't, or they won't.

And now it seems they will continue not doing so, at least for the foreseeable future.

 Calling time on time management. Such a baseball thing to do.