“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Pitch-Clock Man
I am sitting in a half-empty Barney’s Beanery on Santa Monica Boulevard, and like normal, I am complaining. My beloved Philadelphia Phillies have just crashed and burned in the second round of the MLB playoffs, and for the zillionth year in a row, we’ll go home full of what ifs, maybes, and might-have-beens, rather than results.
I’ve never dipped into the BDSM sex world, but to some degree, caring about baseball feels like a similar kink. Only here, my dom is a dude in red pinstripe pants who spends exaggerated amounts of time plotting and planning which pitch to throw – calculating whether a curve or a fastball will get the job done, as he ritualistically bends and contorts his body to prepare for release. The hitters tape and re-tape their gloves, waiting for the inevitable question to swing or not to swing – while I, the viewer, take on the holistic hope that my guys do it just a little better than their guys. And every year, we get it up to believe. And every year, it ends the same way.
But this is part of the fun. And this is part of the reason I have grown to be such a wickedly talented complainer. We live to care, and the following of something that doesn’t actually matter – that we’ve deemed to be the only thing that matters, is what makes for such sumptuous, fertile ground to bitch and moan about. Complaint is a shared experience. Baseball is a shared anguish. So long as people partake in the misery, there’s a validity to my obsession.
My friends – a group of random dudes scattered between age twenty-five and thirty-nine who found each other through the collective trauma of being Philly transplants in LA – are all getting drunk to drown their sports sorrow. My Dad and his childhood chums are texting in a group chat with me about how every year is the same. My grandfather – recently deceased – is somewhere in the afterlife wearing a dulled red Phillies ballcap and awaiting Joe Carter – the man whose home run eliminated the famous ‘93 Phillies from the World Series – so he can bemoan what he’s done to us all.
Fairly soon, though, the game is over and the realization that it’s only like, 5pm on a Tuesday kicks back in. My friends leave quickly, and I am left charging my phone in an empty booth, alone against tomorrow. The bar was already half-empty when the game was going. Now it’s barren.
If this was a football game, it’d still be rollicking and loud. If this was a viewing party for a popular show, we’d all be talking about it now. But it’s baseball – a shrinking product in an eternal battle for viewership and care. And much as I want to complain, the sudden lack of ears to listen is becoming all too apparent.
Of course, I am not the first to notice this self-evident truth. Baseball’s viewership has been on a steady decline for a long while now, and because of this, the MLB has been on a mission to course correct, inventing the pitch-clock: a literal timer on each thrown pitch meant to speed the game up, desecrate the slow-build for a faster release, and, hopefully, give way to a new generation of baseball fans.
Once upon a time, the average baseball game lasted three hours and eleven minutes. This was fine. It is fine (football is longer anyway). But the methodology behind the length has changed. When baseball was truly “America’s pastime” the sport was either meant to be viewed in person or listened to on the radio. Watching from the stands, each pitch was a moment. A decision. A strategic choice. On the airwaves, it allowed the announcer to pontificate. Guess. Narrate. Dramatize.
Then came the television. Baseball was still a big deal. The other sports hadn’t really rounded into form, and we all had longer attention spans in general. Who cares if a pitcher took forty-five seconds to wind up and do his little mound routine? Who cares if the batter wanted to re-tape his gloves every twenty seconds because it gave him a sense of spiritual satisfaction? This was part of the theater. Part of the show. These routines gave players personality. It’s said that legendary pitcher Warren Spahn used his overlong windup as a method of psychological warfare. The longer he angled and maneuvered before throwing the ball, the longer the batter had to overthink. Performance art may be too strong a phrase, but what are sports if not invented drama?
Baseball, at that time, still dictated the mythology of a country. Marilyn Monroe dated Joe DiMaggio, because of course she did. Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron took civil rights into their bats and mitts, leading the way for integration of black Americans into mainstream sporting at large. Lou Gehrig set records and then defined disease. Yogi Berra paved the way for the damn adage industry.
Where ball players went, America followed. At least, for a time.
But the last twenty years have been tough for baseball. There are a lot of reasons, but here are some popular theories:
And that last point seems to be the one the league has zeroed in on. Baseball wants young fans. Young fans have short attention spans.
Now, post clock, a pitcher has only fifteen seconds to wind up and throw. If there’s a runner on base, they’ll have eighteen seconds. A batter, simultaneously, has seven seconds to get set, place themselves in the box, and anticipate the oncoming pitch. The average game, as a result, is now two hours and thirty-eight minutes – down thirty-three from the year before.
This may not seem like much, but to TV ad deals, in-person concession pricing, and overall game experience, it’s a massive sea-change. Almost an entirely different experience. Decreased tension for increased action. This sacrifice should – in theory – be what makes the league accessible; what brings an older product into a newer generation of viewers. Which, of course, begs the question: is it working?
Well. In short, no. It has not. The fall in overall viewing numbers has stayed just about the same. The advent of the pitch-clock has made media members who need to stay up for games and give live-reactions happy, but that’s about it. Ten years ago, the world series averaged 14.5 million viewers. The last three years, it averaged 11. This year, only 9.5. Local viewership ebbs and flows with the success of the team, but across the board, there’s a twenty-five percent decrease in eyeballs since 2004 – with the differentiation between last year’s clock-less and this year’s clock-advent MLB years measuring only a 1% increase.
Young people still aren’t watching highlights. Shohei Ohtani is probably more famous in his home country of Japan than he is in the American market he plays for.
We’ve lost time and we’ve lost legend. If baseball is myth, then unreality is dying. Old timers still care about the sport, but without a fresh influx of new viewers, the cultural impact of baseball will simply cease to exist, even if the sport remains. It will begin to exist in the same way that going to a Steely Dan concert does: a countdown to ecstasy for those who can’t buy a thrill.
Pitch-clock or no pitch-clock, the game will remain in our society, and slowly but surely, it’s the care that will fizzle – not the product itself. Player salaries have only gone up in the last couple of decades, and the MLB television deals are locked in for a few more years – at which point it’ll be up to the streaming services to decide what’s next. Maybe one dollar hot-dog nights at the stadium will vanish, and ticket sales will have to get jacked to make up for lost income, but if that’s the greatest sin committed by the slow-burn death of baseball, most die-hards will keep watching without a second thought. There’s no pitch clock on caring, but there’s certainly a limit to the capabilities of keeping track.
In 1951, Bobby Thompson hit a walk-off home run to win the National League pennant – an event that would soon be dubbed “the shot heard ‘round the world.” This title was a reference to an Emerson poem, the “Concord Hymn”, that narrated the first gunshots fired in the revolutionary war. It was later used as a nickname for the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, kicking off World War One. The more things change, the more things stay the same, the more things get nicknamed.
But reality, for now, is Barney’s – where I sit – a gentleman junkie in the squalor of an empty bar. I guess it’s time to drive home.
When I get there, I’m sad. And then I get distracted because the Sixers season is starting soon, and the Eagles are undefeated so far. Then I get even more distracted because I’m supremely hungry and Instagram keeps promoting pictures of kittens wedging themselves into boxes, and it’s funny and it’s cute. So, I make food and I watch some cats and I search for football podcasts and before long, the failure is in the rearview. Tick-tock goes the clock, and I suppose I’m the fool who bothered to care in the first place.
I’ve never dipped into the BDSM sex world, but to some degree, caring about baseball feels like a similar kink. Only here, my dom is a dude in red pinstripe pants who spends exaggerated amounts of time plotting and planning which pitch to throw – calculating whether a curve or a fastball will get the job done, as he ritualistically bends and contorts his body to prepare for release. The hitters tape and re-tape their gloves, waiting for the inevitable question to swing or not to swing – while I, the viewer, take on the holistic hope that my guys do it just a little better than their guys. And every year, we get it up to believe. And every year, it ends the same way.
But this is part of the fun. And this is part of the reason I have grown to be such a wickedly talented complainer. We live to care, and the following of something that doesn’t actually matter – that we’ve deemed to be the only thing that matters, is what makes for such sumptuous, fertile ground to bitch and moan about. Complaint is a shared experience. Baseball is a shared anguish. So long as people partake in the misery, there’s a validity to my obsession.
My friends – a group of random dudes scattered between age twenty-five and thirty-nine who found each other through the collective trauma of being Philly transplants in LA – are all getting drunk to drown their sports sorrow. My Dad and his childhood chums are texting in a group chat with me about how every year is the same. My grandfather – recently deceased – is somewhere in the afterlife wearing a dulled red Phillies ballcap and awaiting Joe Carter – the man whose home run eliminated the famous ‘93 Phillies from the World Series – so he can bemoan what he’s done to us all.
Fairly soon, though, the game is over and the realization that it’s only like, 5pm on a Tuesday kicks back in. My friends leave quickly, and I am left charging my phone in an empty booth, alone against tomorrow. The bar was already half-empty when the game was going. Now it’s barren.
If this was a football game, it’d still be rollicking and loud. If this was a viewing party for a popular show, we’d all be talking about it now. But it’s baseball – a shrinking product in an eternal battle for viewership and care. And much as I want to complain, the sudden lack of ears to listen is becoming all too apparent.
Of course, I am not the first to notice this self-evident truth. Baseball’s viewership has been on a steady decline for a long while now, and because of this, the MLB has been on a mission to course correct, inventing the pitch-clock: a literal timer on each thrown pitch meant to speed the game up, desecrate the slow-build for a faster release, and, hopefully, give way to a new generation of baseball fans.
Once upon a time, the average baseball game lasted three hours and eleven minutes. This was fine. It is fine (football is longer anyway). But the methodology behind the length has changed. When baseball was truly “America’s pastime” the sport was either meant to be viewed in person or listened to on the radio. Watching from the stands, each pitch was a moment. A decision. A strategic choice. On the airwaves, it allowed the announcer to pontificate. Guess. Narrate. Dramatize.
Then came the television. Baseball was still a big deal. The other sports hadn’t really rounded into form, and we all had longer attention spans in general. Who cares if a pitcher took forty-five seconds to wind up and do his little mound routine? Who cares if the batter wanted to re-tape his gloves every twenty seconds because it gave him a sense of spiritual satisfaction? This was part of the theater. Part of the show. These routines gave players personality. It’s said that legendary pitcher Warren Spahn used his overlong windup as a method of psychological warfare. The longer he angled and maneuvered before throwing the ball, the longer the batter had to overthink. Performance art may be too strong a phrase, but what are sports if not invented drama?
Baseball, at that time, still dictated the mythology of a country. Marilyn Monroe dated Joe DiMaggio, because of course she did. Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron took civil rights into their bats and mitts, leading the way for integration of black Americans into mainstream sporting at large. Lou Gehrig set records and then defined disease. Yogi Berra paved the way for the damn adage industry.
Where ball players went, America followed. At least, for a time.
But the last twenty years have been tough for baseball. There are a lot of reasons, but here are some popular theories:
- Football and basketball are faster paced, more exciting, and thus more hip to contemporary pop culture. Kids grow up on what keeps their attention, and it’s much easier to put together an Instagram reel or TikTok compilation of highlights for players’ more athletically explosive movements (dunking; throwing a long pass; running fast; tackling) than analyze the slight curve of a well thrown ball. Even a homerun, which should be the most exciting thing in a given ballgame, kind of blends into every other home run. The ball goes boom, the crowd cheers, and the highlight is over.
- There is a lack of stars in the MLB that people give a fuck about, and several reasons for this woeful truth. For starters, baseball players wear very big helmets to prevent getting thumped in the head by a fastball, and it’s a little hard to tell who is who. Baseball players also tend to either be A) chunky corn-fed midwestern white dudes or B) large Dominican men. They blend together under those big helmets, and even the stars of the sport bat somewhere around .291, which means in any given game, the best players on the planet have a chance to stand around hidden under a large hat and strike out four times. Compare this to, say LeBron James on an NBA court or Tom Brady in an NFL game. Even when they lose, they’ll do something impressive, and it’s very easy to tell where your star players are. LeBron’s face is staring right back at you and Brady is in the designated quarterback spot commanding the whole offense. Moreover, the biggest star currently in baseball is Shohei Ohtani. He’s both a top five hitter and top five pitcher – something that hasn’t been done since Babe Ruth. He’s also Japanese, doesn’t speak English fluently yet, and until this summer when he signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers, played for a team that never made the playoffs (the largely irrelevant Anaheim Angels). Baseball is a team sport. One great player does not a great team make.
- Baseball has 162 games in the regular season. That’s way too many. Nobody has time to care every goddamn day. It’s very easy to tune out the sport until the playoffs when things actually “matter” – and become unbonded to a team through lack of regular season watching.
- Baseball is fairly regional. You can follow your team, but it’s a much bigger lift to follow the entire league. Even if you do watch every game your team plays, you’re not gonna watch the thousands of other games per year that your team doesn’t. Compare that to the NFL, where fans will carve out all day on Sunday to watch the games. Scarcity and designation build event-ized viewing.
- Baseball is – let’s face it – kind of a boring TV product. It takes a while to watch very little happen. It’s nice and fun to go physically to a game, but when the end results don’t hurt the bottom line of the season because there are 161 more, it’s hard to care.
And that last point seems to be the one the league has zeroed in on. Baseball wants young fans. Young fans have short attention spans.
Now, post clock, a pitcher has only fifteen seconds to wind up and throw. If there’s a runner on base, they’ll have eighteen seconds. A batter, simultaneously, has seven seconds to get set, place themselves in the box, and anticipate the oncoming pitch. The average game, as a result, is now two hours and thirty-eight minutes – down thirty-three from the year before.
This may not seem like much, but to TV ad deals, in-person concession pricing, and overall game experience, it’s a massive sea-change. Almost an entirely different experience. Decreased tension for increased action. This sacrifice should – in theory – be what makes the league accessible; what brings an older product into a newer generation of viewers. Which, of course, begs the question: is it working?
Well. In short, no. It has not. The fall in overall viewing numbers has stayed just about the same. The advent of the pitch-clock has made media members who need to stay up for games and give live-reactions happy, but that’s about it. Ten years ago, the world series averaged 14.5 million viewers. The last three years, it averaged 11. This year, only 9.5. Local viewership ebbs and flows with the success of the team, but across the board, there’s a twenty-five percent decrease in eyeballs since 2004 – with the differentiation between last year’s clock-less and this year’s clock-advent MLB years measuring only a 1% increase.
Young people still aren’t watching highlights. Shohei Ohtani is probably more famous in his home country of Japan than he is in the American market he plays for.
We’ve lost time and we’ve lost legend. If baseball is myth, then unreality is dying. Old timers still care about the sport, but without a fresh influx of new viewers, the cultural impact of baseball will simply cease to exist, even if the sport remains. It will begin to exist in the same way that going to a Steely Dan concert does: a countdown to ecstasy for those who can’t buy a thrill.
Pitch-clock or no pitch-clock, the game will remain in our society, and slowly but surely, it’s the care that will fizzle – not the product itself. Player salaries have only gone up in the last couple of decades, and the MLB television deals are locked in for a few more years – at which point it’ll be up to the streaming services to decide what’s next. Maybe one dollar hot-dog nights at the stadium will vanish, and ticket sales will have to get jacked to make up for lost income, but if that’s the greatest sin committed by the slow-burn death of baseball, most die-hards will keep watching without a second thought. There’s no pitch clock on caring, but there’s certainly a limit to the capabilities of keeping track.
In 1951, Bobby Thompson hit a walk-off home run to win the National League pennant – an event that would soon be dubbed “the shot heard ‘round the world.” This title was a reference to an Emerson poem, the “Concord Hymn”, that narrated the first gunshots fired in the revolutionary war. It was later used as a nickname for the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, kicking off World War One. The more things change, the more things stay the same, the more things get nicknamed.
But reality, for now, is Barney’s – where I sit – a gentleman junkie in the squalor of an empty bar. I guess it’s time to drive home.
When I get there, I’m sad. And then I get distracted because the Sixers season is starting soon, and the Eagles are undefeated so far. Then I get even more distracted because I’m supremely hungry and Instagram keeps promoting pictures of kittens wedging themselves into boxes, and it’s funny and it’s cute. So, I make food and I watch some cats and I search for football podcasts and before long, the failure is in the rearview. Tick-tock goes the clock, and I suppose I’m the fool who bothered to care in the first place.