SIDELINE SCENE: Pitching changes at heart of baseball's pace problem

I attended two sporting events last week outside of my obligations for this Sports section.

I was excited about both of them, and both of them were a success — but there was one key difference between the two that struck me.

The two events I’m talking about were the baseball game on March 3 between the No. 6 UCF Knights and No. 2 Florida Gators (as ranked in the latest Baseball America rankings), and the subject of my column from last week, the MLS debut of Orlando City Soccer Club on March 8 at the Citrus Bowl.

As mentioned, they were both a success: the largest home crowd in UCF history watched the Knights take down the Gators, 4-3 (don’t worry, Gators fans, UF whooped up on UCF the next day), and more than 62,500 fans clad in purple erupted as a late-game goal by Kaká preserved a 1-1 tie and averted a spoiled home-opener.

Both games, on the whole, were exciting, and they reminded me why I love sports and do what I do.

But just one of the two games had a point where I gave serious consideration to leaving early, in spite of the fact that it was a close game — the baseball game.

The Orlando City game, in its entirety, was roughly two hours. MLS games include two 45-minute halves, extra time and a halftime period (about 15-20 minutes).

The UCF-UF baseball game was nearly three-and-a-half hours long.

And, although there were some contextual circumstances unique to a midweek game in college baseball (i.e. coaches have an inclination to use every arm in their bullpen) — the length of that game is in no way some drastic outlier in the collegiate or professional ranks.

And that’s the problem — we live in a society with an ever-decreasing attention span, and baseball has a culture with an ingrained leisurely pace.

I’m certainly aware that steps are being taken by Major League Baseball to combat this, and some of them are being demoed in spring training. Things like pitch clocks and new rules on batters having to stay in the box are going to be tried in the minors.

And that’s good and all, but I can’t shake the feeling that baseball is trying to avoid a crossroads with some “Band-Aid” changes.

What that crossroads is is simple — fundamentally changing the essence of baseball at the price of staying relevant as the average age of its fanbase gets older.

I say fundamentally because what baseball is trying to do with certain rule changes is offset habits that are a decade in the making with fines, and it’s also avoiding the real elephant on the ball field — pitching changes.

You can time pitching changes, as has been suggested, and it certainly would help to allow fewer on-field warmups for relievers (that’s what the bullpen is for), but at the end of the day, the more pitching changes there are, the longer the game will be.

This is the point at which I considered inflicting pain on myself at the ballgame last week, as the Knights and Gators — who cruised through nearly five innings in the first hour or so — started making pitching changes.

And then the fun stopped.

Consider how specialized pitching has become: there are starters, middle relievers, setup pitchers and closers — an accepted formula for pitching one game.

You want to know why games were shorter back in the day? Pitchers threw a lot more complete games and, if there were changes, there weren’t nearly as many.

I watched a high school game on Friday that played 10 innings in roughly two hours — with one pitching change made by each ballclub.

The problem is, I can’t in good faith offer up the solution, at least not at this point. Something about pitching change limits just sounds innately wrong, doesn’t it?

And yet, to my experience, pitching changes are where games get unbearable and a limit either on the number of them, or their frequency (see, guys brought in to face one batter), would dramatically shorten games.

And, I’d also assert that if you’re going to implement timers, as MLB is considering, you might as well take the full step and actively work with Little League baseball and other levels of youth and prep baseball to emphasize pace-of-play practices and rules at those levels so that you’re not simply trying to offset a decade of acquired habits through fines and penalties.

My dad instilled a love for baseball in me that persists to this day; otherwise I wouldn’t care enough to write this column — or to go to a mid-week college baseball game.

So, I hope I don’t get misconstrued as a baseball-hating millenial.

A limit on pitching changes seems heretical, and attempting to change the way kids learn the habits of the game at the very beginning seems extreme, but there are realities at play — and when the average age of someone viewing the World Series is 54.4 years and the professional game is becoming a niche sport, you have to start asking hard questions.

Contact Steven Ryzewski at [email protected].