The various levels of minor league baseball have long doubled as a live laboratory of sorts for Major League Baseball. It’s where proposed changes to baseball rules go to test their viability. And as baseball desperately looks to speed up the pace of play, a pitch clock looks to be the most effective way to get that done.
With the new CBA, MLB will be able to institute a pitch clock as soon as the 2023 season. It’s inevitable. But wow, it’s pretty clear that some baseball fans are absolutely going to hate it.
A bizarre sequence out of the Class-AA Texas League went viral over the weekend, showing the Midland RockHounds’ Jordan Diaz getting called out on an “automatic” strike with a 2-2 count because he wasn’t ready for the pitch fast enough. Here’s the video:
he was literally in the box? pic.twitter.com/RAiUt5aYSa
— Jomboy Media (@JomboyMedia) May 2, 2022
A couple minor-league rules came into play there. The first being that a batter is required to keep a foot in the batter’s box at all times unless he’s granted time. Diaz did appear to have a foot in the box as he collected himself between pitches, but home plate umpire Pete Talkington appeared to rule against Diaz for a pitch clock violation.
See: The pitch timer doesn’t just apply to the pitcher. In Class AA, pitchers have to deliver the pitch within 14 seconds with the bases empty (18 seconds with a runner on). But the hitter also has to be in the box and ready to hit at nine seconds remaining on the pitch clock.
And that was where the ruling was a bit harsh on Diaz. He swung and missed, briefly collected himself and was fully in the box right around eight or nine seconds left on the clock. He wasn’t intentionally eating into the pitch clock or holding up the game, but Talkington thought it was enough to call the automatic strike (the penalty for batter pitch clock violations). A pitcher violation, on the other hand, would have been an automatic ball.
Despite the umpire’s announcement of the call seemingly taking up more time than a pitch would have, the rule has been able to cut the average game time down to around 2.5 hours. It’s going to come to MLB soon, but that video certainly did not have fans excited for the change.
