One of the most harmful inventions in the history of humankind—alongside the machine gun, Agent Orange, and the coffee pod—is the timepiece. Having to know the time is a form of enslavement; without it, we’re free to do things when it feels best to do them, to our own advantage. Few feelings match the lazy Saturday morning when, freed from the school bell and the morning train schedule, children and adults are free to operate as the sun and their stomachs demand. Today everyone carries the time in their pocket, and are almost never allowed to exist outside of it.
Baseball was once one of those rare realms, before the pitch clock arrived in 2023. While the vast majority of fans support the rules they put in place, there are those who still bemoan what we’ve lost, a certain amiable languor that no other sport, not even soccer (despite its fiercest attempts), can replicate. I sympathize with those people, but I enjoy a 150-minute game more. It’s understandable to wish that the game could exist outside of time, but time crept its way in: through the arms of pitchers who slowly, unconsciously realized that time was their ally, and the sport made it free. The longer they waited, the better they pitched. Like so many inventions, they took this good idea and ruined it for everyone.
The goal of life is not to banish time from existing—I mean, if you can, go for it, but good luck—but to not have to feel it. Children are, distressingly, very good at this. The most successful inventions are the ones that feel essential, but the best ones are the ones that are invisible. A perfect pitch clock is the one no one ever sees.
Kyle Finnegan does not work fast. The Nationals closer went into the evening with eight pitch clock violations to his name, three more than his nearest competitor. And those competitors are largely starters; on a rate basis, Finnegan has more than doubled any other pitcher with at least a similar workload (123 batters faced). Reliant on summoning up high-90s heat, often up in the zone, he’s willing to suck up every moment bequeathed to him. Saturday night was no different.
Thanks to the pervasive use of the pitch clock on the chyron, a minor evolution I’ve made the case against in the past, we can establish how long Finnegan was taking to pitch. Almost.
There’s a spoiler buried in there, if you somehow don’t know how Kyle Finnegan’s evening wound up. But before we explain I do want to note just as the K-Zone isn’t a perfect representation of the strike zone, and the chyron doesn’t have the clock down to the tenth of a second in basketball or football, it’s not always reliable here, either. Several times the Rockies camera cut away from a long shot showing a time, only to have the chyron repeat that number. So Finnegan may have been a full second slower at times than the graph above.
It wasn’t going to be a fun night for the Nationals regardless of how it ended. Up a single run heading into the bottom of the ninth, Finnegan gave up a sharp single to Hunter Goodman on a two-strike count, and then a dainty opposite-field knock by Jake Cave. Brenton Doyle tried to bunt both runners over, failed, and wound up singling himself to tie the game. Ezequiel Tovar got into his comfort zone by working into a two-strike count of his own, and then lashing at a fastball well off the plate for yet another single, loading the bases.
Ryan McMahon stepped in and fouled his way into an 0-2 count before battling back. Balls two and three were fastballs that sailed far too high, and before Finnegan could deliver the payoff pitch, catcher Keibert Ruiz leapt up to make the pitcher disengage, and give himself a fresh clock. It was a mistake.
Finnegan stepped back amidst the usual taunts of the home crowd, grabbed the rosin bag, and wandered back to the rubber. But though he puts his right foot in position, he isn’t really ready to deliver. The clock has started, :10, and he’s looking down:
He digs his cleats in, plants his front foot, and looks up to the catcher. We’re at :07.
Finally, he draws back his glove and sets. We’re at :04. Still plenty of time.
And then, with glove raised, he just… stops. Three, two, one, zero.
Finnegan finally pulls back the ball and goes into his motion. But before the pitch, the home plate umpire steps out from behind the catcher. It’s none other than Hunter Wendelstedt, the same man who made the decision on the check swing of Teoscar Hernández last week, allowing the extra pitch that the Dodger would use to beat the Rockies. This time will be different. He shouts at Finnegan, taps his wrist, and points Cave home. The crowd does not go wild; the crowd doesn’t know what’s going on yet.
One man who does know what’s going on: Jake Cave, who starts pointing the instant the clock hits zero. Jake Cave is a man who enjoys pointing angrily at things.
It is the first walk-off pitch clock violation in the history of Major League Baseball. Finnegan’s pitch, a half-second later, flies high and inside for what would have been ball four, if the game hadn’t already ceased to exist. It doesn’t matter. The Nationals television crew, to their credit, are on top of it; they even note that Wendelstedt gave Finnegan an extra tick or two after the clock hit double-zero. It was about as non-controversial as a game-ending play like this was going to be; after all, Colorado’s win expectancy when McMahon stepped in was already 94%, and higher than that with a three-ball count.
It’s an unsatisfying conclusion; you’d always rather watch someone win than someone lose. As Alan Trejo lugs around the Gatorade cooler, trying to figure out who deserves its crystal blue refreshment, and the rest of the Rockies share their surreptitious laughter, the crowd just stands there, bemused. It doesn’t seem real.
Which is ultimately the problem, so much as there is one. The pitch clock shouldn’t exist, but the incentives of pitchers willed it into being. Even now that it does, we should never have to see it, any more than we should be forced to count mound visits. These boundaries should be invisible, but they can only be that way as long as everyone respects them. We are, slowly, getting there. Last year, league-wide, we saw a pitch clock violation in just a hair above 0.1% of pitches. This year it’s down to 0.07%. It’ll find an equilibrium, and that number will be north of zero, but in time it’ll feel like just a freak occurrence, like catcher’s interference used to, before it took the league by storm this year. It’ll all be fine. Next time Kyle Finnegan will watch the clock a little more closely, and we won’t have to.
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While there have always been romantic notions about the lack of a clock in baseball, people have been bemoaning the length of the game since the 1950’s, when most games were 2.5 hours long or less.
We can bemoan the clock, but it’s stemmed a 70 year trend in games getting longer without more appreciable action.