Several MLBers last week said that players want a voice in the league's pace-of-play initiative and that they are "concerned that, so far at least, no one except the players' union has asked them what they thought," according to Jayson Stark of ESPN.com. Free agent P Kevin Slowey said, "We don't want to overpower any other voices. We'd just like to have our voice heard." Mets RF Curtis Granderson added, "It's just important for us to have a say." Stark noted no active players "were among the seven members appointed" to the pace-of-play committee last month by Commissioner Bud Selig, but MLBPA Exec Dir Tony Clark is "one of the members." Commissioner-elect Rob Manfred added his expectation is that, at some point in the process, the committee "will hear directly from players." Several players outlined "areas of concern over what they are seeing and hearing" about MLB's pace-of-play approach. One is that "too much of the blame for slowing the game -- and most of the responsibility for fixing it -- seems to have been placed on players." Another is that "almost none of the talk so far has been about other ways to speed up games, particularly shortening commercial breaks between innings" (ESPN.com, 10/10). In Boston, Kevin Paul Dupont wrote under the header, "It's Time To Speed Up Baseball." At issue is "cutting down the game's periods of inaction -- specifically the time it takes pitchers to deliver each pitch and those changeover periods between innings." Red Sox COO Sam Kennedy said that the average game in '14 "totaled 284 pitches, exactly the same" as in '03. That is "further proof" of "just too much dithering time." Kennedy: “Identical number of pitches. The adjusted seconds per pitch in 2003 was 26.4 seconds ... and in 2014 it was 29.8 seconds. So, do the math over 284 pitches -- that is 16 additional minutes right there. That captures what is happening. It’s not really more pitches, less pitches ... it is the significant increase in inaction over the last decade" (BOSTON GLOBE, 10/12).
