Major League Baseball’s pace of play has taken a step back this season, but there might be some changes on the horizon.
Boston Red Sox chairman Tom Werner joined WEEI’s “Dale & Holley with Keefe” on Tuesday during the WEEI/NESN Jimmy Fund Radio-Telethon presented by Arbella Insurance Foundation, and he touched on multiple topics, including pace of play.
“Well, we’re working on it (pace of play),” Werner told “Dale & Holley with Keefe.” “We’ve obviously slid a little bit this year. The pace of play is not what it should be. I do think that we’re going to make some changes. And hopefully we can see it — these games are exciting, but I come from a time when the games were at two-and-a-half hours and then you’d go home — and I think we have some work to do. It’s not so much the action, it’s the time between action.
“We’re even looking at in some ways trying to take an experiment and see if we can limit the number of mound visits. So, we’re talking about changes. The game is a great game, but games can afford to change. You know, basketball didn’t have a play clock, and then it did. You can see that anything that we can do, anyway, to make the period between action shorter would be great.”
Werner said he wasn’t advocating for such changes as making games seven innings long. But there are other changes that could be made to help trim down on the amount of time between plays.
The 16th annual Jimmy Fund Radio-Telethon will take place Aug. 15 and Aug. 16, and you can help strike out cancer by donating here.
Thumbnail photo via H. Darr Beiser/USA TODAY Sports Images
