“People never want to give you the benefit of the doubt when you want to change” - MLB commissioner Rob Manfred on overhauling baseball’s future

Over the last couple of years, Rob Manfred has made big changes to the MLB. He implemented an extra wild card and readjusted the wild-card Round. He also added the pitch clock, the universal DH, the ghost runner in extra innings and the bigger bases, among others.

These changes were met with major backlash when they were proposed and when they were implemented, but they seem to have been successful. Manfred said via The Athletic that no one thought they would be.

“People never want to give you the benefit of the doubt when you want to change," Manfred said on Monday. "Their immediate reaction is, ‘Oh, my God, it’s going to be worse.’”

He added that he knew the pitch clock would be controversial.

“I had come to the conclusion in my own mind that whatever change you make, there’s going to be people who call it heresy, so you can’t make decisions based on that," Manfred said. "What we really did need was something that was firm and prescriptive and had durability. And the clock seemed like the only thing I could come up with.”

It worked to cut down how long games took, as the average in the first year of the pitch clock shrunk to below three hours for nine innings.

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MLB exec praises Rob Manfred's pitch clock decision

The pitch clock has been perhaps the most controversial change Rob Manfred initiated for the MLB. It dramatically changed how pitchers played, but it was successful in shortening games and making them more accessible to fans.

Rob Manfred added the pitch clock (Getty)

John Thorn, the league’s official historian, said that it was a huge success.

“The pitch clock returned the game to its ancient roots and rhythms," Thorn said on Monday, via The Athletic. "Ordinarily, the entrance of the machine spells the end of art, but in this case it restored baseball from a flabby parody of the old game to something that, strangely, resembled it.”

The average duration of games during the first year of the pitch clock era in 2023 dropped by 24 minutes as games lasted an average of 2:40. 2024's average game time was 2:36, making it the fastest season in 40 years.