Sometime in the future, near or far, Major League Baseball will probably begin using a pitch clock to penalize sluggish hitters and pitchers.
The sport without a clock will, someday, have a clock. ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian offered that as one of his predictions for what baseball could look like 20 years from now, which would be one of Rob Manfred’s signature reforms as commissioner.
This kind of change wouldn’t be necessary, though, if more pitchers were like Mark Buehrle.
“Buehrle was hyper,” pitching coach Don Cooper said. “He wanted to go, go, go.”
No pitcher since 2007 — when Pitch F/X began calculating “pace” — worked faster than Buehrle, who averaged 16.