Rob Manfred wants to bring pitch clocks to the majors next year

Rob Manfred is ready to bring some changes to baseball. (Getty Images/Alex Trautwig)

Since he took over as Major League Baseball’s commissioner, Rob Manfred has shown a willingness to embrace new ideas. Now that he’s had some time on the job, he’s looking to implement some of those radical concepts.

Manfred’s latest desire is to bring a pitch clock to the majors. The league has already experimented with 20-second pitch clocks in the minors, and Manfred believes it’s time to take them to the next level, according to Bob Nightengale of USA Today.

“Our view of the pitch clock is that we feel it’s been effective in the minor leagues,’’ Manfred said, “we really do. I think when you look at our experience with the effort we undertook last year, and you look month-by-month in terms of where we were in terms of game time, we did really well early and kind of regressed the second half of last year, and certainly this year.

As far as a timeline for getting pitch clocks to the majors, Manfred is comfortable with next season.

When asked if he would like to see the clock implemented perhaps as early as next season, Manfred didn’t hesitate.

“I would,’’ he said. “I said yes because there’s no temporal assigned to that.”

If the pitch clocks do come to the majors, pitchers would have just 20 seconds in between each pitch. According to Manfred, only a few minor-league pitchers violated the rule. It would only impact notoriously slow workers on the mound.

On the surface, it doesn’t seem like a major change. Twenty seconds seems like a decent amount of time to someone watching the game, though it would be interesting to hear from actual players on the issue. That said, any fan who has watched Clay Buchholz take what seems like an hour to throw a single pitch will support the change.

Manfred also discussed two other issues when he met with owners Thursday: A limit on defensive shifts, and a limit on pitching changes. This is not the first time Manfred has openly discussed eliminating shifting from baseball. Manfred made waves shortly after he took over as baseball’s commissioner after suggesting he was open to defensive shifts being banned from the game. He walked back on that after receiving negative comments from fans.

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Limiting both defensive shifts and pitching changes would have a major impact on the game, though it’s less clear how serious the commissioner is about implementing those rules. At this point in time, we don’t have an idea of how much either of those things would be limited, or what Manfred is considering. There’s no need to overreact just yet, but both issues are worth watching.

For now, it seems pitch clocks are the most important issue for Manfred. While it would be useful to get feedback from players on the issue, MLB has experimented with them in the minors, and it hasn’t drastically changed the game. Bringing them to the majors seems like the next logical step in this experiment.

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