The pitch timer (its official name, though some still call it the “pitch clock”) has been excellent for baseball, in my opinion. In the early-season going, the average game time has dropped by about 25 minutes, about the same as happened during Spring Training. And it’s not just that the games are shorter, there’s more action (including far more stolen bases) and less dead time, and batting averages are up. Small sample size, of course, but it seems to me that the timer is doing exactly what Major League Baseball hoped it would do — move baseball back to the more action-filled, balls-in-play style of play that we saw in the 1980s.
A few more thoughts on the MLB pitch timer
