DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) – Trey Alessio had just settled into his seat in the press box Friday night when one of his Iowa Cubs colleagues came up and razzed him.
“A lot of pressure on you tonight. Nervous?”
Another staffer chimed in, “Are you the clock man? Oh, my. Whoa.”
Alessio, a 21-year-old college student and media relations intern for the Triple-A Cubs, was the man who stopped and started Principal Park’s three clocks – one by each dugout and another in right field – as full enforcement of professional baseball’s new pace-of-play rules began.
The rules were announced in February after the average time of a nine-inning game in the majors stretched to a record 3 hours, 2 minutes last year.
Pitchers have 2 minutes and 25 seconds to begin their windup or come to set between innings. They have 20 seconds to do so between pitches. Batters must be in the box and ready for the pitch when the clock strikes 5.
In the minors, warnings were issued through April. Starting Friday, balls and strikes were to be added to the count as penalties against pitchers and batters. In the majors, players were to face possible $500 fines.
The first violation here occurred when the Oklahoma City Dodgers’ Matt Carson stepped out of the batter’s box after the clock had struck zero at the start of the sixth inning. Home-plate umpire Chris Gonzalez called timeout, pointed at Carson and then turned to the press box and signaled a 0-1 count.
The rules seem to be helping. The average game length in the majors was just under 2 hours, 54 minutes through Wednesday, more than eight minutes less than in 2014. Games are 11 minutes shorter in the Double-A Southern League and 10 minutes shorter in the Triple-A Pacific Coast League.
Alessio was clock operator for the fourth time Friday and, yes, he admitted there was a little more pressure knowing that his judgment on when to start and stop the clock could cause a pitcher or batter to get penalized. The key, he said, was “being in sync with the umpires.”
The clock became an issue once, and perhaps should have been another time, before Carson was nailed.
Dodgers starting pitcher Joe Wieland was on base when the top of the fourth inning ended, and by the time he got back to the dugout to retrieve his glove and jog to the mound, there was 1:02 on the clock. Gonzalez, the umpire, exercised his discretion to waive the rules. He turned toward the press box and waved his arms, a signal for Alessio to shut off the clock. That gave Wieland extra time to warm up.
In the top of the fifth, Oklahoma City’s Buck Britton wasn’t in the batter’s box when the clock hit zero at the start of the inning, but Gonzalez did not call it a violation.
For scorekeeping purposes, violations will be counted in pitchers’ and batters’ statistics, Minor League Baseball spokesman Jeff Lantz said.
If a strike three is assessed, the play will be scored as a strikeout, so both the pitcher and the batter will have a strikeout added to their stat lines. In the case of a ball four, the walk will go on the pitcher and batter’s stat lines, but it will not count on the pitcher’s pitch count.
Alessio said clock operators were given the pace-of-play rules about two weeks before the season and discussed them on a conference call with Pacific Coast League officials. Alessio had a dry run during a college game at Principal Park.
Cubs president and general manager Sam Bernabe, a member of the Professional Baseball Playing Rules Committee, said he doesn’t care for what he called a “shot clock” in baseball. He’s worked for the Cubs for 32 years, and he said clocks and baseball don’t mix.
But if a clock is what it takes to keep the game moving, he can live with it.
“There is a difference between time and pace, and we should pick up the pace of the game,” he said. “Whether it shortens the game or not remains to be seen. There’ll have to be several years of observation and clockwork to see if that happens.”