Something Around to be Loathed: Baseball’s New Pitch Clocks

“The machines are to practically everybody what the white men were to the Indians. People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don’t apply any more. People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves, or wards of the machines.” Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

Baseball was the sport without a clock. Earl Weaver believed that fact made it the greatest game of them all. Hank Azaria in Brockmire praised that baseball “doesn’t keep time because our actions should determine our fate, not some stupid clock.” This contributed to why baseball felt like a pastoral game in spite of its city roots (including the first recorded ballgame played at Hoboken’s Elysian Fields). Like a farmer or a cowboy, action happened at the pace of baseball. Beer was sold until the first pitch of the 8th inning. A 1916 contest between the Asheville Tourists and Winston-Salmen Twins lasted 31 minutes and a 1981 game between the Rochester Red Wings and Pawtucket Red Sox lasted 33 innings and over 8 hours on two separate days. Ushers, vendors and other employees get paid so long as the men in pajamas were playing the beautiful game. This harkened to pastoral clockless-ness. Time wasn’t the currency. Baseball, like farming, was task oriented. The rhythms ensued naturally from the demands of the tasks themselves, not against a contrived means of control. That is until this season, when baseball followed a long line of soulless, profit-obsessed commodifiers.

Time keeping, in the form of sundials and obelisks, predates the Iron Age. Emperor Zhezong of Song sponsored Chinese inventor Su-Song to build the first known mechanical clock (a 40 foot monstrosity with 133 clock jacks). Yet until the industrial revolution, these inventions were novelties for rich nobles. Time keeping had no impact on the common laborer. In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari humorously illuminates that, “history is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was plowing fields and carrying water buckets.” These masses lived simply and in tune with the needs of their surroundings, with lives determined by interests and nature. The needs of the flock or the crops urged action and if no action was necessary, there was no reason the masses couldn’t drink beer or pursue whatever idle activities tickled their fancy. They rose at dawn and slept at dusk. Failing to promptly meet the needs of your environment was unsurvivable yet nothing could be gained by overworking. You played an infinite game, one whose goal was simply to keep playing.

Enter the industrial revolution. As desires expanded beyond simple survival needs, those in charge felt compelled to track people, processes and profits in standardized ways. The use of the clock exploded. Willard Bundy is a particular villain of this story due to his 1888 patent of the punch clock. Workers revolted. The Luddites broke machines and early industrialists had a difficult time getting people to show up for work. Why did the working class have an issue with this new clock-based worldview? It recontextualized time. Instead of being the substance we exist in and as, time became a way to ascribe value, productivity and worth. Time became money which begat anxiety and the commodification of our lives.

In this vein, the power brokers of baseball have fundamentally changed their sport’s relationship to time with these new pitch clock rules (accompanied by other rule changes aimed at reducing player agency such as pickoff limitations and batter called time out limits, authoritarian control seems to be the new game and it’s unsurprising these rules specifically were passed against the voting interest of players). I recognize that many players were already within compliance of these new rules and that all will be physically capable of adapting. We are on average shaving only three seconds off of the time between pitches. Even Kenley Jansen has adjusted to compete within the new rules. But this type of analysis misses the issue.

This new time and data centric worldview lacks the language to discuss issues of ethics, philosophy or abuses of power. Data are a powerful tool when considering questions of where to most effectively position fielders or how to best develop a pitching arsenal. Data can prove that all players are capable of adjusting, that young players are more likely to already have a quicker pace having come up through pitch-clocked minor leagues and that overall game times are going down. Yet those data have little to add to the conversation that those young players might be best equipped to adjust to pitch clocks because they are so vulnerable with the most to lose by not obeying. These young ballplayers have less voice and agency than their more established peers who already have guaranteed deals. Obedience born of a desire to fly chartered planes and sleep in Ritz Carltons rather than rejoin the only class of American laborers unprotected by minimum wage laws. Data are great at telling us what we can do, but not whether that makes it ethical to force vulnerable dreamers to comply. Market logic can’t be the only tool used when conversing matters of should. We need ways to value, other than simple material benefit.

While at a recent spring training game, I was struck by the fact that there existed an event that lived beyond the bounds of clocks. During the seventh inning stretch, but before “Take Me out to the Ballgame,” the timekeeping was put aside to observe “God Bless America.” Take this as a form of precedent, a case in point. We, or maybe more accurately those in charge, believe that patriotism and faith exist beyond the reaches of consumerism. These are called values. It’s cool and important to be proud of things in your life for reasons beyond how much they cost or could pay you. Beyond anxiously tabulating as a way to feel in control of an uncontrollable future. To all the fans and players standing at attention during that part of the game, celebrating our country was all that mattered. Being present to the infinity of that moment was all that mattered.

I am all for improvements to baseball, but it’s important to consider the direction of those improvements. The larger bases for instance improve baseball in the direction of what already made baseball great as they improve safety and may lead to more aggressive baserunning. Data will be helpful in defining and proving those successes. However, defining value by the dollar or by eyeballs exclusively is lazy and dangerous. 

I want the best baseball as expressed by those best at playing baseball. I want them to perform when they’re ready and comfortable performing. Reducing them to cogs beholden to a watch is soulless, loveless and prideless. We shouldn’t perpetuate abusive power structures just to get to the next commercial break quicker (tellingly the increased usage of clock-based control will not reduce the amount of time between innings in which teams/owners collect advertising revenue). We should allow for expression in the manner that most fully respects that thing’s voice. Data and economics are useful tools capable of improving many areas of our lives, but should stay out of issues they willfully obscure and pervert.

Artists from Joni Mitchell (“…give me spots on my apples but leave me the birds and the bees…please…”) to Kurt Vonnegut Jr (above) have lamented the commonness of subjugating joy and love to the anxious worst elements of modernity. Of superimposing the illusion of health on those constrained by losses of freedom. What is beautiful about baseball? That question will vary widely among fans, but its answer seems a healthier path forward than what is currently taking place. Take pride in the quirky, gripping contradictions of this game of failure. Submit to the vagaries of the round ball and round bat. Should baseball live within the machine’s terms or should we force the machinery to operate on baseball’s terms? The question of what ought to compel the action, exists beyond the ability of data or dollars to express.