New York Yankees pitcher Wandy Peralta showed Thursday just how effective baseball’s new pitch clock can be. He struck out the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Tucupita Marcano on three pitches in about 20 seconds at an exhibition game in Bradenton, Florida. (Watch the video below.)
Pitching data analyst Codify called it the “the quickest strikeout in baseball history.”
The moment proves you might want to skip the ballpark concessions line this year, because you could miss a lot.
Rules now enforced to quicken baseball’s pace give pitchers 15 seconds to throw the ball to home plate with no one on base, and 20 seconds with at least one base runner.
The early indications from spring training baseball are that the pitch timer is working. After the first four days of games in Florida and Arizona, the average length of a game was 2 hours and 39 minutes. That’s 20 minutes faster than the duration of exhibition games at the same time last year, USA Today reported this week.
The average duration of a nine-inning MLB regular season game in 2022 was 3 hours and 3 minutes ― and that was down from 3 hours and 10 minutes in 2021.
Check out this split-screen comparison of Peralta’s strikeout to the pace of a regular-season game between the New York Mets and San Francisco Giants.
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