So why should that outfielder, when he is a batter, get to step away from the plate for a year and a Tuesday after each pitch? To contemplate the moon, smoke a cigarette, read Life magazine, perhaps? Seems to me the batter gets a tremendous advantage over the pitcher by getting to consider that last pitch’s location, speed, movement, to adjust his batting gloves, helmet, socks, jock, to stretch his neck, back, legs, to consider the new count and what changes that makes in the pitcher’s strategy or in his own….

It's axiomatic that pitchers will want to "work quickly, throw strikes, and change speeds." (I seem to recall this as the tripartite philosophy of some Orioles pitching coach, as quoted by Jim Palmer, in some book by Tom Boswell.) But if they’re prevented from working quickly by the umpires allowing batters to call time instead of reserving that privilege for themselves, pitchers’ repertoire of techniques gets reduced by a third. Of all the rules-changes that have been proposed, the easiest and the most effective wouldn’t be a rules-change at all, just a strict enforcement of the rule about who gets to call time out.

Or maybe a radical enforcement of a rule that has been allowed to fall into disuse would constitute a de facto change in the rules. What I suggest would be not only to enforce the rule allowing the umpire to decline the batter’s suggestion of calling for "Time Out," but to allow batters to request "Time Out" only rarely, under emergency conditions, and with significant penalties for excessive requests. In effect, what I’m calling for is to compel the batter to stand within the batter’s box for the entirety of each at-bat.

If he steps out without the umpire’s permission, which will be rare, the pitch will count, be it strike or ball. To allow for the event of an actual emergency, such as a cinder in the batter’s eye, or a cracked bat  or a ball fouled off the instep of the batter’s foot, or something of the sort, each batter would be allowed to call "Time Out" himself—once per game. The second and subsequent "Time Out" requests will be met with a penalty of a strike being called. (If you think two free "Time Out"s per game is fairer, knock yourself out.) Otherwise, the batter stays within the confines of the batter’s box for the entire at-bat. This not only quickens the game’s pace but adds to the athleticism on display, which we all want to see more of.

This small but significant enforcement of the rules will have, I think, a gigantic effect on not only the pace of the game and the athleticism, but also on the strategy. It obviously creates an inducement for the pitcher to throw his next pitch almost as soon as he gets the last one returned to his glove, thus eliminating most of the tedious shaking off of signals, fussing with the rosin bag, strolling to the back of the mound, and so on between pitches. The pitcher and the catcher will need to develop a pre-game plan to pitch to each batter, and will need to stick to it in order to "work quickly."  Some pitchers will thrive under these circumstances, others won’t.

But the largest change will be in which batters thrive under these circumstances, and which batters don’t. Those who don’t will be the less skilled batters, those who either need 30 or 45 seconds to figure out what kind of pitch they might expect next, or those who lack the ability to recognize certain pitches as they come up to the plate. Smart hitters, and hitters with great pitch-recognition skills or great instincts, will be rewarded, while those who need some extra time to figure out their strategy—well, they’re fresh out of luck. "B-b-but I wasn’t READY!"??? As my Boy-Scoutmaster used to say, "It’s ‘Be Prepared,’ not ‘Get Prepared.’"

The big winner in this scheme will be us, the fans. We will need to pay closer attention to the game on the field, of course, because an active play might develop three or four times per minute, and the winners on the field, overall, will be the pitchers, which is also a goal devoutly to be wished, if we are also interested in seeing home runs and walks coming down, and pitch-counts being lowered. No need to loosen the winding of the actual baseballs, or move fences out, or store the balls in a deep-freeze, or anything of the sort. Simple giving the pitchers the power to control the pace of the game, and to use that pace as another arrow in their quiver, should suffice. In addition to quick-pitching (most of the time), the pitcher would be able to make the batters feel uncomfortable as they stand in the box waiting for the pitcher to decide to begin his motion. Power to the Pitcher, right now!

My model for the batters’ getting one automatic "Time Out" per game is the managers’ challenge, which has worked out, near as I can tell, almost perfectly: managers are prevented from abusing this privilege by the codicil stating that they can lose it only by challenging incorrectly, forcing them to self-police specious challenges from ones where they’re pretty sure they’re going to win the challenge. Batters won’t be able to abuse the "Time Out" if you limit them to one per game. I don’t believe they would even use up one per game, for fear that they might genuinely need one in a later at-bat, or in extra innings. You would see a lot of one-time "Time Out" requests used in the eighth and ninth innings, as batters run out of "later at-bats." In any case, it makes sense to have a slower pace at the ends of games, as strategic decisions play a greater part in the outcomes of the games. After all, why would batters in the early innings deliberate carefully between pitches of what will eventually be a blowout win or loss? Better to save them up in case they’re needed at the end of a close game. If the score is tied or close in the final innings, that’s the time to slow things down and carefully consider each pitch and each swing.

Managers’ challenges, by the way, show a lot of individual disparity, both in the frequency and the success rate, which surprised me a little when I looked it up: Don Mattingly currently trails in the frequency category (only 4 successful challenges this year) and in the success rate (those 4 represent only a 25% success rate) but Joe Girardi is looking pretty good, leading the majors in success rate (73% as of this morning) while Jeff Banister (he of the 1.000 lifetime MLB batting average) has challenged a MLB-leading 38  times, with a pretty good 60% success rate.  In fact, Girardi, or the Yankees, has done consistently well in challenging calls since this rule was instituted in 2014—he’s been at or near the very top of the success rate all four seasons this rule has been in effect. My impression is that the managers’ challenge-system is a huge success, for all the complaining I hear about the time it takes to confer with the umps in Chelsea, I’m sure net time is saved preventing all the ruckus and dustups of managerial arguments which had little to no effect on umpires’ decisions, though there were those in 2013 who predicted that challenges would slow down games and still not get the calls right.

I think a similar success can be achieved by a strict enforcement of the "Time Out" rule. It would make baseball more a game of athletic skill—the burden it would place on batters, to be able to stand in the batter’s box, ready for a pitch at any moment, is a burden inherent to the game: letting the batters decide when time is in and out has crept into the game increasingly and surreptitiously over the years,  but it is clearly a violation of the rules, as written.

One thing that has disappeared from the game over my lifetime is the disincentive for batters to dig in. Bill remarked recently that the ethos of the game has changed in that taunting or showing up of opponents has declined sharply in the last few decades, but one way it hasn’t is that batters are permitted to make themselves extremely comfortable before every pitch, to a degree that used to offend most pitchers. Not only are the batters’ helmets, batting gloves, etc. sitting very comfortably on each pitch, but batters have been permitted to call time out even while they’re standing in the box. At the very least, superstars have been granted this special dispensation: I’ve ranted before about Mike Piazza and Derek Jeter having been allowed to dig their spikes in precisely their desired placement in the box while simultaneously holding up their rear hands, like a stop sign impeding the umpires’ ability to declare the ball in play until the superstar says he’s 100% ready to face the pitch. A few decades ago, that would have been an invitation to the pitcher (if "talk to the hand" had even been permitted) to throw a brushback pitch. The most colorful way a pitcher has expressed his views of such a tactic is "You’d better dig yourself a nice deep hole, because I’m going to bury you in it!", shouted from 60 feet away.

The brushback pitch would also be enhanced as a tactical weapon. This is seen, perhaps, as an undesirable re-innovation of a tactic that we have, in our climb towards civilization, left behind, but note that I wrote "brushback" and not "deliberately hit batsman." Pitchers might be inclined to throw the inside fastball a tad more if it would both keep batters from digging in and disturb their firm footing at the plate.  Every pitch following a brushback would be a race between the batter regaining his footing and his equilibrium, and the pitcher getting off a quick pitch.

If we want to cut down on the number of home runs (and I do) it seems logical that some of them must result from the batters’ extreme comfort at the plate, which I would argue is actually a high degree of comfort contrary to the rules, which state that when the umpire calls "Play Ball" action must commence, and that action doesn’t stop until and unless the umpire calls "Time Out."

There will still be home runs, there will still be hits, but they will come off the bats of those batters prepared, like Batman, for any circumstance.  Very likely, what we will see as a result will be batters reaching out for any hittable pitch they can punch to the outfield grass, and not necessarily a pitch they can belt over the fence. An added advantage to this quickened game would be a possible improvement in fielding, as defensive players will need to be more alert.

Does this make the game harder to play? Yes, yes, and yes, all around—but who says the game’s goal is maximum comfort for the participants? On the contrary, the whole idea is that the games are demanding and stressful, despite which the best athletes in the best shape will emerge victorious.

As Matt noted, a new type of skilled pitcher may emerge from this enforcement of rules: a pitcher physically capable of firing pitch after pitch, at an accelerated rate, more quickly than most batters can cope with.  They’ll soon learn how to cope, while the game speeds up and improves considerably. Of course there are many other ideas for speeding up the game (reducing the numbers of throws-over to 1B, limiting the number or kind of pitching changes, etc.) but this is the only one I've found that would cut down by many minutes the length of games, improve the quality of competition, while requiring no change in the rules as written.