Last year, the average MLB contest took a little over three hours to complete. If you somehow had enough time in your life to watch every single one of your team’s single-season games from beginning to end in 2017, you would’ve spent around 505 hours watching baseball over the course of the year— time that you could have used to listen to “Fly” by Sugar Ray 7,460 times.
Baseball might still be the most popular sport in America thanks to the country’s increased hatred of both concussions and kneeling that caused the NFL to lose favor this year, but MLB knows people aren’t exactly thrilled with its consistently-increasing amount of time it takes to finish a game.
Thankfully, the league will be taking a tiny step toward increasing the pace of play starting this season.
As of 2018, teams will be limited to a maximum of six visits to the pitcher’s mound over the course of nine innings. The policy applies to any visit by a coach, manager, or players (including catchers) that doesn’t involve a pitching change. The league also considered adding a 20-second “pitch clock,” but decided against it in order to avoid being liable for the death of any baseball purists who might suffer a heart attack while trying to process so many rules changes at once.
While this adjustment to the rules might be devastating news to anyone who enjoys watching a coach spit on the ground after every sentence while talking to pitchers covering their face with their glove while stalling for time, I don’t think many people will mind the new policy.
