Watching a pitcher take five minutes to throw six pitches to a single hitter should make all but the most iron-willed fans cringe. This happened last Friday when Yomiuri Giants Masumi Kuwata had runners on the corners and no outs in the sixth inning against the Yokohama BayStars. Kuwata didn't take forever, but it sure seemed like it.
He'd look at a runner, look at the catcher, step off the rubber, look at the other runner, fake a pick-off throw to third, look at the catcher...
It's time to start limiting throws to the bases. Let's do what baseball analyst Bill James has suggested and start penalizing pitchers who interrupt the flow of the game to throw to the bases without getting a runner out.
James suggests that for every failed pick-off throw after the first in an inning, the batter receive an extra ball in the count--in essence making the cost of a pick-off throw nearly the same as a pitch out.
But what's to keep pitchers from holding the ball on the rubber until the base runners are immobilized by leg cramps and the fans have left the park in disgust?
It's the umpire's job to ensure that doesn't happen by ordering the pitcher to deliver to the plate.
One of the least appreciated jobs of an umpire is to keep the game moving, something James says was widely commented on in the days when baseball games were run by a strict and inflexible clock--the sun.
Night baseball has encouraged the game to embrace stalling tactics, cat and mouse games, and committee meetings on the mound.
Instead of giving the umpire the license to call every pitch from me to you a strike or a ball as he sees fit, we might be better off by giving them the authority and responsibility to keep the game moving.
Of course, issuing new responsibilities to umpires would require that the establishment take on more responsibility in training, monitoring, and disciplining the umpires so that they conform to expectations.
For a variety of reasons, the establishment has been particularly poor when it comes to supporting and improving the skill of the men in blue and helping them find other work when they have proven that they are not up to the task of umpiring.
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Another major source of dead time is the use of relievers to face just a batter or two. James' solution is to permit each team to make just one mid-inning change per game of a pitcher, unless he has allowed a run in the inning. This would force teams to change pitchers between innings rather than leaving the current pitcher in to face one batter.
It would also mean fewer batters being called back for pinch hitters after a pitching change.
No wonder the complete game is held in such high esteem here. Unless someone goes the distance, you have little chance of seeing a game in under three hours.
If enforcing pitching change limits is too drastic, how about this? Give the umps a stopwatch to time pitching changes.
"You only get what, five (warmup) pitches here? But it takes longer than the eight or nine you get in the States," said Nippon Ham Fighters pitcher Chris Seelbach.
"It's eight pitches there, but it depends on who you are. Some guys can get as many as they like, but they're getting the ball and throwing it back, so it doesn't take as long. Here, it's throw a pitch, wait five minutes and throw another one."
But just getting the new pitcher to the mound can take a lot of time, especially when the change is not required by a second trip to the mound and involves a long meeting.
"(In the U.S.) there's no meeting," said Seelbach. "It's, 'Give me the ball and get your ass out of here.'
"With the bull pen under the stands (at Tokyo Dome), they can be throwing four or five more pitches. (In the U.S.), the manager comes out, signals to the umpire, the umpire points to the bull pen and says, 'Let's go.' That's it.
Here the umpire can't see them (the relievers). You don't know what they are doing."
Giants reliever Hector Almonte provided some insight into the slow motion world of domed stadium bull pens.
"They call the guy and he's going calling his ma, says 'Mom I'm going to go pitch now, you can watch me on TV,' changes his T-shirt," said Almonte. "They don't do that, but it looks like it. Everything's so slooow."
The Hot Corner appears each Thursday in The
Daily Yomiuri .