Major League Baseball begins its 2023 season today, with Thursday, March 30, marking the first Opening Day since 1968 that every team in baseball is scheduled to play. This is Opening Day as it should be—twelve hours jampacked with games from fifteen cities from coast to coast. The fact that this has never happened in my lifetime is a testament to how bad the stewards of the game have been at marketing the sport to the general public. Baseball has always been a regional sport, with limited interest in any given area for teams other than the local favorite. This is not football, the game of the week between the Yankees and the Dodgers is never going to pull in 20 million viewers—ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball does not average even 1.5 million viewers.
And that’s fine! There does not need to be mass, collective interest in any one of the 2430 regular season games played between the beginning of April and the end of September for baseball to be great. The sport is not about big, spectacularly-hyped main events. Rather, baseball blooms into season in the spring and becomes part of the fact of everyday life—it’s not the momentary weather, it’s the climate. It is a game of constant, humbling failure and the unrelenting promise that you can start clean again tomorrow. The humility cuts both ways, though—whatever successes came today, there is still tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
It is a game that is still, even with the new pitch clock, played outside the boundaries of traditional sports timekeeping. You still have to make twenty-seven outs. Each individual pitch might be on the clock, but the at-bats and innings and games will still go on for as long as it takes to decide a winner. The game is over when the players have determined the outcome on the field—one at-bat at a time, outside of time—not when some big clock ticks down to all zeroes.
The season should always begin as it is today, with all these games at once, because baseball is still best when it is collectively experienced, not as any one individual game but as an expression of shared culture. What matters is that we are doing this together and apart, in backyards and on t-ball fields, in little leagues and high schools, on college campuses and in beer leagues, from wide-open dirt fields to the soulless and gleaming aluminum and glass modern monstrosities—isolated from one another but participating in a common purpose, to create meaning from chaos, to submit to a seemingly arbitrary system of rules as a means of testing the limits of the will, to find where it breaks, where it meets an opposing force or simply crashes headlong into unaccountable vagary. Like the states, distinct but united under a common set of ideals—laboratories of meritocracy and fate.
Play ball.
In Jayson Stark’s final look-ahead at the season—MLB in 2023: 9 numbers that will define a transformative season with new rules—he gets Mets’ ace and generally beloved go-hard lunatic Max Scherzer to talk about the good and the bad of the introduction of the clock to baseball.
Scherzer then made a bold proposal, which you should have known was coming, because he’s Max Scherzer. The clock is working, he said. So as long as players play at the pace MLB dreamed about when it implemented a clock, why should it impose that clock on every single pitch of every single game? The clock should only be on, he said, if players intentionally play too slow.
Scherzer: You need a play clock in football because the sport’s timed. We don’t have a game with that design. This (clock) is not about time. This is just about pace. And for the most part, we’ve all adjusted our routines to match the pace. … So why bring the ball-strike implication into it if we’re all playing at pace?
Max Scherzer has discovered the heart of the problem of living in a society. Ideally, baseball players would not need the clock. Hitters would promptly walk to the batter’s box when it was their turn, ready to hit, and remain in the batter’s box until the at-bat reached its natural conclusion. Pitchers would receive the ball from the catcher and promptly deliver it back towards home plate, over and over again, until either the batter became a runner, or was called out. And, in the event that either of these two parties was failing to hold up their end of the promptly bargain, the non-partisan official tasked with the disinterested application of the rules of the game would correct the behavior. Perhaps this behavior could be corrected by a simple reprimand, or perhaps the issuing of stern warnings, but at no point would the umpire be required to impose a consequence that had a material impact on the outcome of the game, because the game must be determined by the actions of the players on the field. Unfortunately, as the meme says, we live in a society.
In Scherzer’s ideal, the vast majority of players understand that the league wants to emphasize an increased pace of play, and do as told. Social pressure and the threat of the umpire turning the clock on would be enough to keep things moving at the league’s preferred pace. But the problem with a rule that is only enforced according to the subjective judgment of a designated official is obvious—it leaves clear room for bias, unconscious or otherwise, to play a determinative role in outcomes. One might argue that so does the strike zone, or any other judgment call, but umpires are carefully analyzed for their ability to call a consistent zone, and they’re getting better every year, thanks to the increased scrutiny that technology brings. But stick something as subjective as how much time to grant a person to prepare themself to see the next pitch, or deliver it, in the hands of fallible, irritable men? That’s begging for trouble.
And it’s a responsibility that umpires have willingly abdicated for years. They’ve always been in charge of maintaining pace of play! They simply have shown no interest in forcing a player to stay in the box during an at-bat, and allowed the players to take as much time as they desire. These players are often paid many millions of dollars a year, and some jerk in a mask behind the plate is going to tell them to stop redoing the velcro on their batting gloves twenty times an AB?
I can see the headlines already, can hear the voices on NPR in my head: study shows umpires disproportionately call subjective time violations on minority, especially dark-skinned, players; statistic reveals that black and brown pitchers twice as likely to get penalized for failing to pitch promptly, groups call on MLB to hire antiracist consultants and promote more BIPOC umpires; Jackie Robinson may have broken the color barrier in 1947, but structural racism and implicit bias persist in umpires’ subjective understanding of relative time.
Scherzer’s ideal is how we got here, in need of the authoritarian ticking clock. Because humans will almost always take what is offered, and then a little bit more, if they think it means gaining a little advantage. Because it is easier to give someone ten seconds to adjust their helmet and elbow pad again than it is to make a stink about it. Because it is perfectly nice to imagine that everyone will do as asked without threat of punishment—and everyone might well intend to, right up until the moment that the walls start closing in, and stepping out of the box or off the mound feels like a little bit of relief from the mounting pressure. We don’t make laws with attendant harsh punishments for breaking them because people are unaware that the outlawed behavior is bad—the law codifies our mere collective suggestion because while most people would probably be just fine without it, a lot of people, even if only due to circumstance, need the structure of hard rules to point them away from undesirable outcomes, and towards preferred ones. Laws don’t prevent the murder and mayhem that do happen, but how many people really want to live in a world where we find out what they have been keeping in check?
In my lifetime, seat belt usage has increased from about ten percent to about ninety percent, coinciding with the enforcement of mandatory seat belt laws passed in the 1980s and 1990s. Is it time to repeal the laws, now that the overwhelming majority are behaving in the preferred way? How long before we started to regress, before mere social expectation sloughed off into indifference?
Max, I wish we lived in a world where we didn’t need a pitch clock. I hope we never see a regular season game decided on a walk-off clock violation, but it’s going to happen. I would prefer it if everyone simply followed the preferred order, and promptly played ball at all times. Would that it were so simple! But we have proven that we are incapable of holding each other to account in this way, and in many others, and now we must submit to the tyranny of the ticking clock. We have failed to bear the burden, each of us, individually, incognizant of our responsibility and duty to each other and the greater system, and now we suffer under the gaze and consequence of an objective, inhuman authority. Baseball is life.
