Give thanks, says Major League Baseball for a problem solved. The problem, it says, is the time it takes to play a game.

This “problem“ though is their interpretation of the mindless nattering by people who don’t understand baseball or appreciate its finer points and a complete failure to even acknowledge that a good third of the “game” is actually commercial-related time outs.

I guess I don’t understand. If you’re not actually watching the game and you just want to be entertained when something happens and you can’t be troubled to think about what’s going on… then I guess that’s a valid complaint?

So let’s consider the solution from the league. A pitcher must face at least three batters or –if he comes in with two outs– get the third out. The thinking is the walk from the bullpen to the mound takes time as do the warm-up tosses, and the commercials, and the mound visits, and the commercials.

The “fix” will is going to hurt some teams in the field because their managers will be kept from putting their players in the best positions to succeed defensively. It’s giving the offense an advantage by allowing three right-handers to come up against a left-hander once the manager on defense makes a switch.

So a lefty-lefty, righty-righty battle might have ended an inning faster in the olden times, also known as 2019. In the new dawn of baseball, we are now likely going to have more offense which means more batters and more plate appearances and… more time.

More batters. More time. Mind blown.

Bad idea. Failed solution. How about we try something that makes sense. How about we legislate “nothing” out of the game. How about we introduce a newfangled thing that has a watch and a stop. We will call it, “A 20-second clock.” Why? What were you thinking. It could also be called the nothing clock, or the fidget watch or the trans-Siberian orchestrated boredom-reducing timepiece. Whatever. It would get the nothing out of the game. As in nothing going on because the batter is readjusting his gloves (or having a seizure) outside the batters box or nothing going on because the pitcher is trying to tell his catcher he wasn’t shaking off the last sign, he was actually trying to keep a gnat out of his ear.

According to MLB Networks’ Tom Verducci, the average length of time in between pitches has increased from 22 to 25 seconds. Any moron can tell you that a pitch clock set a 20 seconds would actually do what major-league baseball was trying to do with this inane, ridiculous moronic, strategy-changing batter requirement.

Some Loogies (Lefty one-out guys) will agree. With the new three-batter pitcher, lefties might be out of a job.

This seems like a good way to watch Major League Baseball take up more time and is a change that a stopwatch is better served to fix. It will be fun to watch baseball’s master plan keep us up a couple more minutes every night.

Thanks for nothing.