Can the pitch clock save baseball?
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 29 March 2023
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
“America’s Pastime” is struggling to keep Americans interested. Today ahead of Opening Day, we talk about Major League Baseball’s introduction of a pitch clock to try to speed things up and appeal to younger audiences.
Read more:
This season, baseball is trying something new to speed up the game: a pitch clock. The goal is to make baseball more exciting by requiring pitchers and batters to move more quickly (but will it actually bring in new fans?).
Reporter Chelsea Janes joins Post Reports just ahead of Opening Day to explain what the pitch clock is and how it will impact the game.
Read about what happened when the pitch clock debuted at spring training this year.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm a pretty casual baseball fan. |
| 0:05.4 | In fact, the only team I've ever loved, the New Orleans Baby Cakes, they don't even exist |
| 0:11.2 | anymore. |
| 0:12.6 | But every year, I do enjoy watching a few games and going to them when I can. |
| 0:18.2 | The catch, though, is they're really long. |
| 0:24.0 | Over the last few seasons and really decades, majorly baseball games increased in length |
| 0:29.1 | by almost a full half hour. |
| 0:32.0 | Chelsea Jeans covers baseball for the post. |
| 0:34.6 | And she's been reporting on recent efforts by major league baseball to attract more fans. |
| 0:40.7 | It turns out that over the last few years, America's pastime has been getting less popular |
| 0:46.5 | with Americans. |
| 0:47.8 | So major league baseball looked at that over the last few years and said, we need to fix |
| 0:51.6 | this. |
| 0:52.6 | We need to speed this up. |
| 0:53.6 | There's a lot of downtime, a lot of fidgeting, a lot of guys taking off gloves, putting |
| 0:57.2 | them on and kind of wasting everyone's time. |
| 1:00.2 | And they said that the best way to fix that after much testing in the minor leagues in |
| 1:04.2 | elsewhere was to limit the amount of time between pitches. |
| 1:11.8 | From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports. |
| 1:15.4 | I'm Chris Velasco, your guest host today. |
| 1:18.6 | It's Wednesday, March 29th. |
| 1:22.3 | Today, just ahead of opening day, we're talking about the pitch clock and whether changes |
... |
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