Baseball, the un-timed game that, theoretically, can last forever, just got its first clock.
As the 2015 season begins on Sunday, the sport finally has acknowledged that it takes too long to play.
The first big moves by Rob Manfred, the new commissioner, were to mandate a maximum time between innings – two minutes, 45 seconds – and limit when batters can leave the box between pitches.
It is hoped the “pace of play” rules will cut 10 minutes off the average game, which crept over three hours in 2014.
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The clock in the ballpark is the overnight change. The new season also inherits a handful of sharpening trends that are changing how the game is played and who is getting to play it.
Who? Cubans, in particular. The trickle of players who once made their way to Major League Baseball via makeshift rafts and midnight escapes is coming in a steadier flow.
Around two dozen Cubans finished the 2014 season in the major leagues. About 40 played in MLB spring games this year. And the level of talent is game-changing.
Power-hitting first baseman Jose Abreu was the American League Rookie of the Year. No one strikes out batters at the pace set by 100-mile per hour (160kph) man Aroldis Chapman. No one enlivens a game with his talent and enthusiasm like outfielder Yasiel Puig.
Who is next? Yasmany Tomas of the Arizona Diamondbacks, signed for US$68.5 million (Dh251.6m)? Rusney Castillo ($72.5m) of the Boston Red Sox? Hector Olivera ($67.5m) of the Los Angeles Dodgers?
For the most part, the Cuban invasion has featured heavy hitters. The sport could use them. Scoring continues to decline. Batting averages are at 40-year lows, and strikeouts continue to rise.
Over the past 10 years, runs have dipped from 4.81 per game per team to 4.07.
Theories abound. Players are still swinging for the fences, like they did in the steroid era, but not reaching them anymore. It adds up to a lot of strikeouts, which does not seem to bother most fans. The best player in ball, Mike Trout, struck out 184 times, leading the American League. If you want to be like Mike.
Relief pitchers are increasingly prominent. Teams are loading up on hard-throwing specialists to close out games as early as the sixth inning on.
The model is the Kansas City Royals, a so-so club who rode the arms of Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis and Greg Holland all the way to the seventh game of the World Series. Look for imitators flattering them.
Then there are those darn fielding shifts. The number of times defences moved infielders into alien places rose 63 per cent last season. The shifting kings, the Houston Astros, re-arranged their infield 1,300 times and saved 27 runs over the course of the year.
Where do we get those numbers?
From analytics, of course. Every team now has its own nerd lab in the basement, spitting out charts. Some are even putting the nerds out front – like the Dodgers, who made notable statistics gurus Andrew Freedman president and Farhan Zaidi general manager.
Analytics are not just about evaluating players. They inform every phase of baseball strategy now.
In the end, at least, it is still about the players and how they perform.
The ones not having Tommy John surgery, at least. The march to the operating room to repair elbows continues this spring, with big names Yu Darvish of Texas and Zach Wheeler of the New York Mets headlining the ranks of those with repaired ulnar collateral ligaments.
During the past 10 years, roughly 200 MLB pitchers have undergone the reconstruction procedure. Why? The guesswork cites over-working young pitchers, bad mechanics, and the premium on throwing the ball as hard as humanly possible.
The good news is that more than 80 per cent of the TJ club resume their careers successfully. If one great pitcher is always on his way to the knife, one always seems to be returning.
That man this month is rising star Matt Harvey of the New York Mets. Time stood still for him in 2014 while he recovered, but the clock on his career starts again next week.
And we do mean clock.
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