Lincicome: New pitch clock proves baseball is a game that doesn't need to be rushed

I've given it more than a week, this new rush-ball thing, wondering what's the hurry and what to do with the extra half-hour saved.

By season's end I will have more than two weeks in my baseball bank, with nowhere to spend it.

I understand baseball's reasoning is that faster games allow fans to get home in time for dinner when we all know that's what microwave ovens and GrubHub are for.

Baseball has not considered what all this time saving might do to the American family, suddenly finding themselves sitting around the table talking about their day and sharing homemade lasagna.

The pitch clock, the chief rascal of the fresh rules, has gotten a bemused pass from players, fans and press boxers, resigned to the new order of the game, getting used to it, adjusting and tolerating, soon to be as entrenched as the designated hitter and the ghost runner, heretofore the most egregious of baseball tinkering.

And still Pete Rose is not in the Hall of Fame. That has nothing to do with this column but I like to throw in a reminder of baseball's myopia whenever I write about the sport.

My favorite of all the rules changes in baseball — less than 50 in the last century, and most having to do with adjusting the strike zone — has always been the 1974 rule that changed the covering of the ball to cowhide since there was, apparently, a shortage of horses.

So the “old horsehide” — a favorite cliché of sports writers for generations — had to be adjusted. Expanding one's vocabulary was an unwelcome burden on the press but nothing compared to the cows.

We must be aware, like the changes or not, this game is not that game. It is a hurried hybrid of baseball, rather like pickleball players cluttering perfectly good tennis courts, or bitcoin pretending to be money.

We are asked to believe that singles and stolen bases are worth boosting and yet that replays are necessary. Talk about slowing things down.

Baseball has always been the game without clocks. You never wondered what time it was but what inning it was. Time did not actually stand still at baseball games, but it dozed, with only the seventh inning stretch to interrupt the flow, and how soon is that going to become the seventh-inning shrug?

There is something spooky about digital stewards blinking away, demanding to be obeyed, ruling the natural pace of play, all in service of emptying the ballpark faster. Shooing your customers away does not seem to be a good business plan.

Those watching at home — the ones clever enough to find the Cubs on cable — are now required to pay attention, and with so little time between pitches listeners are bereft of Steve Stone telling what it was like when he was a player, once the best part of any Sox game.

The distinction of being the first pitch-clock violator fell to Marcus Stroman, the Cubs pitcher, on Opening Day when Stroman noticed the runner on second base was, well, on second base.

Considering his options, Stroman was interrupted by the umpire who pointed out that the new digital timer had determined that there is no thinking in the new baseball.

The White Sox's Tim Anderson, likewise a self-aware player, was guilty of stepping out of the batter's box, incurring a third strike without a pitch being thrown. Unhappy and backed by common sense and geometric logic, Anderson pointed out too loudly that he could not believe such an injustice and was thus, in the grand tradition of arguing with the umpire, thrown out of the game. There is no subtlety in the new baseball.

Baseball's player to watch, Shohei Ohtani, was called for both a pitch and a batting violation in the same game, a distinction he will keep since he is both a pitcher and a hitter. Anything that diminishes the biggest star in the game cannot be all good.

At some point, more serious consequences will result from pitches not being thrown or baserunners not hurrying back or batters miscalculating, maybe during a vital series, or in a pennant race or in the World Series, which is, at this time, on the clock.