Cubs’ Jon Lester Against Newly-Proposed Pitch Clock
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Tom Szczerbowski/Getty Images(CHICAGO) — With Major League Baseball experimenting with a pitch clock for pitchers, Chicago Cubs starting pitcher Jon Lester thinks its a terrible idea.
“If you [use a pitch clock] you take the beauty out of the game,” he said Friday night at the Cubs’ fans convention. “There’s such a cat-and-mouse game as far as messing up hitters’ timing, messing up pitchers’ timing.”
“Different things that fans and people that have never played this game don’t understand. I feel like if you do add a clock it just takes all the beauty away from the game. I think you’re going down a path you don’t want to go down,” he continued.
Major League Baseball will try implementing pitch clocks at the Double-A and Triple-A this season in an effort to speed up the game.
After it was already tested in the Arizona Fall League, it could be coming to the Major League level in the upcoming years.
The penalty for exceeding 20 seconds was a ball added to the hitter’s count. Games were shortened by about 10 minutes.
In 2014, the average game lasted 3 hours, 8 minutes.
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