Come hell or high water; there will be a Twenty-Second Clock in Major League Baseball. The Commissioner says so, and the player’s union will cave. Sad…
You’re on a 20-second clock – Here’s the question you can ask in the next game of trivia you are playing in – What is the only team sport in the United States not governed by a clock? Easy for you, right? It’s baseball. Baseball – Our National Pastime.
“Pastime” is the operative word when it comes to introducing a clock to a sport that was born without one, having functioned just fine since its inception to the point where it is now a $10 billion industry. Here then are synonyms applied to the word “pastime”:
“An activity that someone regularly does for enjoyment rather than work; a hobby, leisure, recreation, amusement, relaxation, pleasure, entertainment, fun, distraction.”
Clocks play a stressful role in our lives. Whether it’s time to report for work, time to feed the baby, time to keep a doctor’s appointment we made two months ago, and so on.
Baseball is timeless. In theory, a game could last forever, even if “The Suits” want to put a man on second base to begin an extra-innings affair. Twenty-seconds on the clock please – wanna equate this to having sex? – draw your own conclusions. Casual fans of baseball already have.
Rob Manfred, the Commissioner of MLB, has instituted a plan for baseball to die slowly, with escalating penalties ranging from advisement that you violated the 20-second clock to an assessment of a called ball for every “violation”, and it’s happening now in Spring Training games.
The locomotive has left the station and is picking up steam. Even though grounded major league players like Max Scherzer are trying to hold up a flag of reason:
Scherzer is factually correct. More foul balls were hit last season than fair balls, and that’s a first as is the fact that there more strikeouts taking a minimum of three pitches than base hits. Nothing seems to matter though when we have a Commissioner who is dead set on what he calls speeding up the “pace of the game.”
Lost in the discussion, though, are the roots of baseball as our National Pastime. The game of leisure where Jack Norworth once wrote these words for his now traditional sing-a-long in ballparks across America – “I don’t care if I ever get back”… Let’s put a 20-second clock on the Take Me Out To The Ballgame…
Sadly, the 20-second clock is a dead issue and for what it’s worth the Commissioner will have his way. Why? It’s called greed. And the assurance the MLBPA (Major League Player’s Association) will fold to get that 26th man on the roster they’ve been searching for, adding 30 major league ballplayers to the payrolls of teams.
I don’t have a dog in this race, and unfortunately, neither do fans against the institution of a clock in baseball. It’s coming just as surely as the Designated Hitter is coming to the National League.
But at some point this season, I do look forward to Max Scherzer charging from the dugout with a bat in his hand when a National’s pitcher has been assessed a ball in a crucial situation in a game because he released a pitch two seconds later than the 20-second clock “rule” prescribes. And then, hopefully in full view of ESPN cameras, smashing the hell out of that clock behind home plate – or wherever they decide to place it.
This is no small step for baseball, nor is it a giant leap for mankind.
Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal.
