Do We Really Need To Speed-Up Baseball?
Major League Baseball has been wrestling with the question of how to shorten the length of baseball games.
They're eager to find ways to speed things up. The New York Times invited staff writers and their readers to offer suggestions (some of which they published earlier this month) — and they were inundated with ideas ranging from the reasonable (more strict enforcement of time outs during at bats) to the unrealistic (actually lop off innings of play, or make it two strikes and you're out).
The history of baseball is a history of rule changes. The mound was lowered after 1967 as a response to too dominant pitching; the foul strike rule — making some foul balls count as strikes — was introduced earlier in the 20th century to counter the opposite problem, the failure.")
