Before my vision began to deteriorate and suddenly the ball was difficult to see, I was a decent hitter. Certainly by the quality standards of the travel team on which I earned a spot while an outsider to the team’s home neighborhood of Forest Hills. After a rocky start, a place in the starting lineup became a regular thing and my contributions helped that gorgeous summer of weekly doubleheaders lead to a Queens championship, my hitting prowess recognized by the team captain at our post-season awards event. Yes, before the keratoconus set in (the same condition from which New York Mets’ outfielder Tommy Pham suffers and what a superhero he is for being able to hit Major League pitching when I can barely see these words being typed) and I couldn’t see the ball, I could hit.
Just not if Keith Caras was pitching.
Back in the halcyon days of the Briarwood-Jamaica Little League when, between the ages of 8 and 15, spring Saturday mornings were blissfully spent on a baseball diamond and the cherry on top of winning was the treat of a dirty water hot dog from the street cart, the only time my confidence shrank was if Keith Caras was on the mound for the other team.
He worked fast. Methodically. Deliberately. Indiscriminately. He took the ball, got on the rubber, and threw the pitch. Got the ball back and pitched again. Batters, all of us, needed to be in the box ready to hit because that pitch was coming. The game was moving. The game was challenging. It had pace, a pulse and it was fun. Even if we couldn’t beat Keith Caras.
All this to say, of course, the new pitch clock being implemented this season by Major League Baseball is a merciful godsend and once, like a new glove, it is broken in and players (and fans) have adjusted people will wonder how we all got on without it. Unless of course, one falls into the category of being captivated by incessant preening, adjusting batting gloves, conferencing at the mound, checking analytics cards under their cap, etc.
Just play the game.
Through a few days of Spring Training this dramatic change has already made a profound impact. The most important of those is not the shorter time spans being pointed out in short- sighted tweets by stat freaks (Spring Training games are always shorter, for multiple reasons) but the actual pace of play the game is undertaking.
You’d like to think er, hope, that was the point of all this. To give the games that aforementioned pulse and have them be played with alacrity – not appease the TikTok generation by offering snack-sized versions of nine innings.
Talking heads on television no doubt are thrilled to have controversial automatic strike calls to bandy about so they can fill air time but look just a bit more closely and it’s easy to see the players will very quickly make adjustments to the way they go about their business. Which ought to make the games a lot more appealing to watch, for everyone.