FORT MYERS, Fla. -- If there were still doubts about Major League Baseball's commitment to speeding up the pace and time of games, perhaps those will now dissipate.
After shaving a little more than six minutes off the average game time a year ago, Major League Baseball Thursday unveiled additional steps to address the issue.
Starting in April, when the regular season begins, visits to the mound will be limited to 30 seconds, thus curtailing the tedious in-game conversations between manager or pitching coach and pitcher and catcher, talks that can drain the drama out of the most exciting games.
(There had been calls for more significant restrictions, such as limiting the number of visits per inning, regardless of how many pitchers are used. But for now, this is a step forward).
Additionally, MLB announced that 20 seconds will shaved off between-inning commercial breaks.
The idea with both these moves -- modest as they may be -- is to keep the game running at a better pace, and, not incidentally, attract coveted younger viewers.
Millenials often complain that baseball is too leisurely, too slow-paced, too -- let's just cut to the chase -- boring. There's too much down time, they maintain, and too many stretches where too little is happening.
Those are, for the most part, valid complaints. At a time when football threatens to suck up all the oxygen (and money) in the room, and younger fans flock to basketball and soccer, baseball runs the risk of lurching toward irrelevancy with fans under 40.
If that pattern continues, the game is in real danger. As older fans die off, baseball's fan base will shrink considerably, to the point where it risks becoming a niche sport.
Baseball has made attempts to address the pace of game before, of course. Managers were asked to be quicker with pitching changes. Hitters were asked to be ready for the start of innings.
But like baseball's one-year obsession with the balk, enforcement was temporary, and eventually, lax.
Not anymore. The changes made last year -- thanks to shorter walk-up music, a directive to remain in the batter's box, etc. -- began to have real effects, with the average game time dipping under the three-hour mark to just longer than 2:56.
Credit here should go to Rob Manfred, who in his first year as commissioner, proved himself to be a stronger advocate for pace-of-game initiatives. Manfred is more aggressive than his predecessor, Bud Selig, who was known to be deliberative -- sometimes to a fault -- and wary of upsetting the game's long-held traditions.
By all accounts, Manfred is said to be more dedicated to growing the game with younger fans, as befits someone nearly a generation younger than the man who held the office before him.
From here, it seems Manfred is artfully implementing changes without angering the players or upsetting purists. They're being instituted in stages, rather than any wholesale makeovers that might upset the game's natural rhythms.
If baseball can match last year's results and carve off another five or six minutes again in time of game this year, that will represent another significant step.
Not long ago, baseball was creeping inexorably toward the 3 1/2 hour game, which would tax even the most loyal viewers.
Now, they're making real progress by going backward.
