I’ve been humbled. I thought the pitch clock would be a disaster for MLB, introducing a kind of microwave-oven quality to broadcasts. It hasn’t. Instead, it has restored pitchers to the pace of the game that was envisioned originally in baseball’s rules.
In fact, the pace of play is so improved that it has nullified any reason for trying to rush the game along in extra innings. The ghost runner — a runner placed at second base to start the tenth — is a statistical fiction. It’s really an offense against civilization. It’s almost a blasphemy. Runs are created ex nihilo, the way God created the world. In the tenth inning, we have the meaningless chaos of paganism. This is proved because it becomes theoretically possible for a pitcher to pitch a ten-inning perfect game and still lose the game — if a runner advances to third on a ground out, then to home on a sac fly.