This week’s “In Case You Missed It” is part of a multi-story “Change of Pace” package that first appeared in Monday’s issue of Global Golf Post examining pace of play in golf. For a link to the Monday issue, which contains the stories, click HERE.
In 1901 – the year Teddy Roosevelt became U.S. president after William McKinley was assassinated and radio signals first reached across the Atlantic Ocean – both the National and American leagues in baseball codified a specific time limit in their rule books on how long it should take a pitcher to put the ball in play.
“The umpire shall call a ball on the pitcher each time he delays the game by failing to deliver the ball to the batsman for a longer period than 20 seconds.”
It only took Major League Baseball 122 years to finally enforce that rule with the implementation of a pitch clock in 2023.
Golf, on the other hand, has only recently placed a specific value on how much time it should take to play a shot. In the 2019 update to the Rules of Golf, 40 seconds was recommended as the upper boundary before reaching what constitutes “undue delay.”
Rule 5.6 states: “It is recommended that you make the stroke in no more than 40 seconds after you are (or should be) able to play without interference or distraction, and you should usually be able to play more quickly than that and are encouraged to do so.”
With the exception of the new TGL simulator league, golf at every level has done nothing to enforce this recommendation.
But with dwindling television ratings and fan frustration with the way golf presents itself in the modern era in which discretionary time is offered plenty of distractions, has golf reached the point where it must seriously enforce pace-of-play protocols with a shot clock?
If so, baseball is a prime example for making a major change to a sport steeped in tradition that improved the quality of the entertainment product.
Baseball and golf have more in common beyond being stick-and-ball games. Neither measure how long it takes to complete their competitions in units of time, but instead with innings and holes. Both endured issues with the expanding duration of how long it takes to reasonably finish, which deteriorated the experience of the players as well as fans.
And both similarly dragged their feet at doing anything about it, with successive PGA Tour commissioners content with play simply finishing by the end of the designated broadcast window no matter how early the leaders needed to start to get that done. But golf – from the fans to players to tour administration – now seems ready to finally tackle the pace-of-play challenge.
How baseball went about implementing a pitch clock to wide acclaim is a lesson that golf’s leadership can learn from. And even though golf would require monitoring dozens of players simultaneously over hundreds of acres on a course instead of two players in a fixed spot separated by the 60 feet, 6 inches between the pitching mound and home plate, it is not an impossible challenge to consider.
Players who have competed using the 40-second shot clock in TGL have lauded it. When asked what elements of TGL he hoped could carry over to traditional golf, Rickie Fowler’s instantaneous response was: “Shot clock, no question.”
“It was much faster than I thought, but … I felt like I had time to choose my shot,” said Fowler’s TGL teammate Matthew Fitzpatrick. “I just wish that was real golf, as well.”
How can golf do that? For a blueprint, look to baseball.
• • •
Baseball games in 1901 averaged only 1 hour, 47 minutes for nine innings and the average remained under two hours as late as 1944. It hit 2:30 in 1959, crossed the three-hour mark in 2014 and by 2021, that average time ballooned to a peak of 3 hours, 11 minutes. Along the way, the debate over the pace of play rose and fell repeatedly.
The only thing agreed upon was that the original 20-second pitch rule was feckless.
“The rule cannot be commended too highly, but unless there is to be an official timekeeper … it is difficult to see how the 20 seconds can be determined accurately,” read a newspaper story on Feb. 28, 1901.
By the 1950s, major league leaders were content leaving it up to the players themselves to quicken the pace. Sound familiar? “Who is going to make a pitcher hurry up when that is his bread and butter?” said National League chief and future baseball commissioner Ford Frick, echoing a long-standing narrative in professional golf.
Through the ensuing years, baseball kicked about experiments like third-base umpires carrying stopwatches and stadiums installing countdown clocks with horns on scoreboards, but the efforts proved typically unreliable and weren’t enforced consistently.
When baseball finally decided to seriously resolve the problem once and for all, it utilized the top four minor leagues to experiment with universally consistent pitch clocks and tinkered with the formula to find the right balance and suss out any unintended loopholes before implementing it in the majors.
“Within an inning, we all kind of looked at each other and said we’d seen enough … we need this in the big leagues.” – Morgan Sword
The experiment – giving pitchers 14 seconds to deliver a pitch with nobody on base and 19 seconds with runners on or be charged with a ball while requiring batters be ready inside the box before the clock hit nine seconds or be charged with a strike – worked. In its first year in use across the minors, it reduced the average game time by nearly a half hour (from 3 hours, 4 minutes in 2021 to 2:36 in 2022). Players and fans appreciated the more consistent pace and rhythm to the games that harkened back to 1980s baseball. And it did so without significantly altering statistical measures for offense or defense while violations steadily decreased over the course of the trial season as players got conditioned to the rules.
“Within an inning, we all kind of looked at each other and said we’d seen enough … we need this in the big leagues,” Morgan Sword, MLB’s executive vice president of baseball operations, told the Wall Street Journal of his executive group’s reaction to watching their first Class A game with a pitch clock.
MLB’s competition committee had seen enough evidence as well to vote for implementing a pitch clock – amended to 15 and 20 seconds depending on baserunners and by the eight-second mark for batters to be in position – for the 2023 season.
By the end of 2023, the average time of a nine-inning MLB game had clocked in at just under 2 hours, 40 minutes – 23 minutes shorter than in 2022 without a pitch clock and marking the league’s fastest average regulation time since 1985. Attendance across the league improved as well.
It was a win-win.
• • •
Golf operated for most of its existence under the “gentleman’s agreement” concept of playing without “undue delay” – a notion that has never been universally heeded. Cyril Walker, the 1924 U.S. Open champion, was so notoriously slow that when he wasn’t sent out in the last group as a single, players in groups behind him were often issued decks of cards to play solitaire while waiting for the hole to clear in front of them.
“I’ll play as slow as I damned well please,” Walker once famously said.
In 1996, the rulemakers tackled the growing concern about slow play by authorizing committees to establish pace-of-play guidelines and enforce them by applying penalty strokes for unreasonable delay.
But penalties for slow play are rarely (or inconsistently) assessed in golf even as tournament rounds on tough courses in difficult conditions have pushed six hours. The worst slow-play offenders have learned how to game the system and pick up the pace just enough when they’re put “on the clock” to avoid penalty. The only way to stop that gaming is by having a real shot clock with real consequences.
“Look, if you could somehow implement the shot clock in some way and be able to police it consistently, I think that would be a really cool thing,” Rory McIlroy said last week after his TGL event. “Much easier to do in this controlled environment compared to a golf course that spans 100 or 200 acres.”
Golf could follow baseball’s example and begin experimenting with shot clocks in its developmental leagues – the Korn Ferry Tour, PGA Tour Americas or Europe’s HotelPlanner Tour. Maybe one tour can test it only around the greens while another tries it through the course to figure out what works best and most efficiently. Only by trial and error can it be honed, perfected and ultimately implemented on the PGA Tour.
Obviously, it would take investment in manpower and technology to operate and enforce a shot clock on every player in a tournament, but that’s where all the investment in PGA Tour Enterprises can be wisely utilized to help build a better and more marketable product. In order for habits to meaningfully change across the game, it has to work from the top down as aspiring pros see what’s expected of them when they reach the tour and prepare accordingly.
To anyone who thinks it can’t be done, professional golf has dipped its toe into the murky shot-clock waters before the TGL. The European Tour first tinkered with the idea in 2017 during team-match events called GolfSixes, in which a 30-second shot clock was applied starting on the fourth hole of the six-hole matches.
But the Euro circuit went all in with a full-fledged 72-hole experiment in 2018, staging the annual Austrian Open as an event called the Shot Clock Masters at Diamond Country Club in Atzenbrugg, Austria.
The rules were pretty simple:
- Players had 40 seconds to hit their shot (the first player to hit approach, chip or putt in each group was allotted an extra 10 seconds);
- Failure to hit a shot within the time limit incurred a one-stroke penalty;
- Players were allowed two time extensions (40-second timeouts) per round.
The time limits were enforced by rules officials riding with each group in carts with large digital clocks displaying the player’s name and remaining time.
The results seemed transformational. The stated goal of then-European Tour CEO Keith Pelley was to try to reduce the average time of rounds by 45 minutes. It came close. The first round’s average time fell 34 minutes from the previous year’s Austrian Open – from 4 hours, 47 minutes to 4:13. First-round scoring averages dropped as well by more than half a stroke and no players were penalized for a shot-clock violation.
What’s more, players who participated generally raved about it. Sweden’s Peter Hanson, who played in one of three threesomes in the first round that got around in less than four hours, said: “I think this is the way we should play golf, and this is the way I was born and raised to play the game.”
The PGA Tour’s Billy Horschel even chimed in from afar while watching the Shot Clock Masters on television.
“Loving this shot clock deal on the European tour,” Horschel wrote on Twitter. “Amazing how fast rounds go when players play within the rules. And guys are still playing great golf. Shocking! Wish we had something like this on the PGA Tour.”
Perhaps the time has finally come to make that wish a reality.