MLB Knows Its Games Are Too Damn Long

We can all agree that there is too much baseball. Or at the very least, the amount of baseball that there is, takes too long. Major League Baseball hears you, and is addressing the problem of making its baseball go faster by forming a committee, which will surely produce lasting, meaningful change and not just, like most every other committee, vague and unactionable recommendations.

"We have the greatest game in the world, but we are always looking for ways to improve [how fucking long it takes]," Selig said in a statement Monday. "The game is at its highest levels of popularity and we will continue to strive to identify ways that can build on its stature well into the future [and make it not take so fucking long]."

MLB's pace-of-game committee will be chaired by Braves president John Schuerholz, and consist of:

Mets general manager Sandy Alderson; MLB Players Association executive director Tony Clark; Red Sox partner Michael Gordon; COO and Commissioner-elect Rob Manfred; MLB executive vice president, baseball operations Joe Torre; and Red Sox chairman Tom Werner.

It seems to me like it would behoove a committee concerned with the pace of games to get input from an umpire, or a current or former pitcher, or an active player or coach. But hey, it's not my committee.

(My committee would recommend enforcing existing rules 6.02(a), (b), and (c), which require the batter to promptly get in and stay in the batter's box and empower the umpire to call a strike if he does not; and rule 8.04, which forces pitchers to throw a pitch within 12 second of receiving the baseball, under penalty of an automatic ball call. My committee also wouldn't have to get a bunch of big names, or meet, or anything like that.)

But maybe it's unfair to intimate that committees are self-defeating sops. After all, if the pace-of-game committee didn't have its shit together, would it have already done this:

Selig has already conducted a conference call with the committee...

All hail the committee.

[ MLB.com]