I can honestly say that I haven’t noticed it, but Major League Baseball has apparently instructed umpires to do what they can to speed up games and the most striking (literally) example of that occurred on Sunday:
On Sunday the Twins were trailing the Brewers by 3-2 with Brendan Harris leading off the eighth inning. After falling behind 0-2, Harris asked home plate umpire Brian Runge for time and seemed to think that he got it as he casually began to stride into the batter’s box and slowly began to set his feet. Runge, however, had not given him time and Milwaukee reliever Guillermo Mota threw a quick breaking ball for strike three before Harris knew what happened.
Major League Baseball has instructed umpires to speed up the pace of play by, among other things, keeping batters from stepping out of the box too often. But the Twins play the shortest games in the American League and this was a pivotal point late in the game. Twins Manager Ron Gardenhire went bananas (it took him a couple of seconds to realize what had happened) and was ejected from the game, which of course slowed things down even more than Harris stepping out of the box.
There are really two questions here. The first is whether it was appropriate for the umpire to call a strike under circumstances where the batter clearly wasn’t ready for the pitch and, in fact, called for a time-out. The second is whether limiting batter time-out’s is going to speed games up considerably.
After watching the video at MLB.com, it seems to me that the umpire got the call right. Harris may have asked for time, but he never stepped out of the batter’s box and time was never called. It was a strike.
That said, I don’t think that limiting batter time-outs would really have that much of an impact on the speed of a baseball game. There are plenty of other factors that tend to slow games down — commercial breaks between innings and pitching changes (which seem to be far more frequent than they were back in the 1970s and 80s) are two that probably contribute more to extending the length of a baseball game than a batter asking for a time-out between pitches.
