MLB: Reflecting on the minor league pitch clock and its impact

I went to a minor league game last week between the Everett Aqua Sox and the Tri Cities Dust Devils.  There are several striking aspects about minor league ball, especially in a Class A game where so few of the players have legitimate hopes of reaching MLB.  The crowd sang Happy Birthday to Aqua Sox catcher Andy Thomas, which was kind of cute, and some guy proposed to his girlfriend at the end of a relay race between innings, which would have made me question if this was a guy whose judgment I would trust with raising my children.

Two things stuck out most of all watching this game.  First was how that, even though these guys are better at baseball than you or I probably are at anything we do in life, the majority of them will never spend a day on an MLB roster.  Of those that do, the vast majority will only get a taste.  To check that theory, I went back to the Everett roster for 2015.  A total of 42 players appeared in a game for Everett that season; of those, seven years later, eleven have appeared in at least one major league game.  One of those was Hisashi Iwakuma, who was on a rehab assignment for the Mariners in his fourth major league season.

Of the others, one, Enyel de los Santos, has something close to a secure job on a major league roster; he has spent the bulk of 2022 on Cleveland’s major league roster and is performing well as a middle reliever.  The rest of the pitching staff from that team has a total of eighteen innings of work this season, the hitters have a total of fifteen plate appearances.  Nobody from that roster has gotten more than 305 plate appearances or 91 innings at the major league level, seven years later.

Maybe that’s an indictment of the Mariners’ player development system, but I suspect taking the same look at 29 other farm systems from 2015 would show that to be the rule more than the exception.  That’s probably what MLB was thinking when they eliminated forty minor league teams last year; every team had a few dozen minor leaguers who are just roster filler.

The other thing that struck me about the game in Everett, or rather didn’t strike me, was the use of a pitch clock.  Pitchers have fourteen seconds to release the ball with the bases empty and nineteen seconds with runners on.  Here’s the thing:  the clock never came into play. No crowd yelling at the umps when the pitcher came close to the limit, because nobody did.  If you didn’t know what the clock was for, it would not have been noticeable at all.  Most of these guys started their minor league careers with a pitch clock or had one in college, so getting the ball and starting their windup is what they are used to.  All of the ball rubbing, cup adjusting, glove tightening, and staredowns that major leaguers feel are essential to the fabric of the game turn out to be utterly pointless.  Like we didn’t already know that.

And guess what?  The game, which ended 2-0 but had multiple pitching changes and was tense until the last out, was over in two hours and three minutes.  Pretty sure there were innings that took that long in the playoffs last year, and didn’t have much more action.  From a fan’s point of view, MLB can’t adopt the pitch clock soon enough.