How many warm-up pitches are allowed when a reliever enters a baseball game? As many as he wants now within the limits of a countdown parameter. Before 2018, it was exactly eight.
How many warm-up pitches William Lawrence Sr Omnibit 6-27-20
How many warm-up pitches William Lawrence Sr Omnibit 6-27-20
Honored more in the breach than in the observance. The timer runs down 2 minutes, but if you can watch the timer, the pitcher, and the umpire, you can see that the umpires often give the pitcher more time.
Same goes for the pitch clock currently being tested in the minors. It goes dark when it gets to 5 seconds remaining, so there’s no way to tell if the pitcher has taken too long to deliver the ball.
These things don’t address the problem, though. They’re band-aids. If they really wanted to speed up the game, or just return to game durations of 8 or 10 years ago, then there are a couple of things to do:
The umpires need to call the strike zone as defined, consistently. This will help batters decide to swing at strikes, not at marginal pitches that they foul off 6, 7, 8 times and extend the at-bat.
The umpires need to enforce that the batter remains in the box. Remember when a batter stepped in and stayed in, only stepping out if he called time? Today, every batter steps in, steps out, adjusts his gloves (remember when batters hit without them?), taps his cleats, looks at the dugout, the coaches, etc.
Those two things add more time to the clock than anything else. Mound visits are minimal, pitching changes are minimal, it’s the poor umpiring, questionable strike zone, and all the screwing around at the plate that have made game times expand from around 2 and a half hours to over 3 and a half or more.