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The Birmingham (Ala.) News has some exciting developments for those who wish to see the pace of play pick up in college baseball. The Southeastern Conference Tournament will experiment with a clock between pitches and between innings in 2010. The SEC will adopt clocks similar to those used in the early 1990s by the Missouri Valley Conference: 20 seconds between pitches, 90 seconds between innings. In addition, there will be no infield practice, cutting the time between games down to 30 minutes from 45-50 minutes. And the early-round games will start at 9:30 a.m. instead of 10.

The SEC projects the changes to save about two hours on days with four games. Last year, the first two days of the tournament ended at 1:54 a.m. and 1:09 a.m.

"It wasn’t just when the games ended. We weren’t hitting any of our published game times all day," SEC associate commissioner Charles Bloom told the News. "The clock also lends itself to a bigger issue, and that’s making college baseball more manageable to television."

Starting this season, ESPN holds the rights to all SEC tournament games.

We commend the SEC on taking this major step toward improving the pace of play, and we hope other conferences follow suit.

This is terrible. Imagine being the closer in the bottom of the ninth with a one run lead, the bases loaded, 2 outs, a full count, 5,000 screaming fans, your third appearence in three days, and a spot in the NCAA tournament possibly in the balance. You come set and then decide to step off because you want to switch pitches, but the “time” runs out. Are you kidding? There is no need for this. There is enough to deal with while pitching under those types of conditions without worrying about a ‘shot clock’.

Instead the SEC, ACC, and other top confrences who regularly get multiple NCAA tourny bids should GET RID OF the conference tournament. Players and Coachs dont want it and dont really care about winning it, they want a NATIONAL championship. It is a bunch of games that teams who are already in the tourny have to play for no reason, extra starts and appearences for pitches and extra time for position players to be injured all while wearing down college kids before the REAL post season begins.

Not to mention, games that start at 9:30am or 10am are a joke. No team does that all year long until they get to a conference tourny.

Posted by Alex | December 22, 2009 at 9:51 am | Shortcut

What's next, the number of foul balls allowed per at bat? The number of times a pitcher can step off the rubber or throw over to first? Sarcastically speaking, if you want to make games quicker, add a short-center postion or I can think of 20 other equally dumb ways to do it.
Seems to me if they were woried about not hitting any of their published game times, then they need to be more realistic when setting up game times.
It would never be placed into effect because of the composite bat industry lobby, but would using only wooden bats at Hoover speed games up?

Posted by Jim | January 6, 2010 at 2:25 pm | Shortcut

I agree with Jim. Why is it that the SEC thinks that useing a pitch clock will work? Has it worked in the MLB? No, and they supposedly have a 30 second limit. Why do we have to speed up a game that has no time limits? In my opinion, that is what makes college baseball such a great sport, <b>no time limits</b>!
SEC, ACC, and all the other conferences that are so worried about hitting your published start times….Get a clue and don't schedule them every 3 hours, schedule them for every 3:30 or 4 hours, and use multiple sites. That way, you will get start when you want to start, and TV can choose which games they want!

Posted by Chris D | January 24, 2010 at 5:21 pm | Shortcut