Pitch perfect: MLB’s pace-of-play rules are showing that less is more

The pitch clock looks down on the field during a recent Philadelphia Phillies game at Citizens Bank Park. Photograph: Mitchell Leff/Getty Images

The time – emphasis on time – has come to declare that Major League Baseball has nailed its effort to speed up games. MLB people always talked about wanting to finish games in less than three hours, but they never could make it happen. Now they have.

The average time of a game in the first two-plus months of the season is 2hr 40min – a span not seen since the early 1980s – much shorter than the bloated averages of 3hr 6min in 2022 and 3hr 11min in 2021. But stats are only part of the story.