Fans are eager to start the pitch-clock era, but baseball’s pitching coaches are hard at work trying to adjust to one of the biggest changes in M.L.B. history.
For the past 150 years, baseball has sold the timeless nature of the sport. How long will today’s game take? However long it takes. But recently, the caretakers of the sport at its highest level — Major League Baseball — have seemed to fret that their game might need saving.
To that end, baseball, a game marketed largely on tradition and tension, is suddenly joining the other major sports in pivoting from its century-old rhythms to a future that was once unthinkable: Starting this year, the sport will let a clock dictate the pace of its action.