Speeding up baseball is something that is necessary to allow the sport to gain more popularity. And doing this by forcing pitchers to throw within 12 seconds with nobody on base and making pinch hitters warm up in the clubhouse are nice ideas that should be enforced.
But there is one very simple way to speed up the great game, and that is to call the strike zone as defined by the rule book.
In current major-league baseball, a pitcher has to hit a target that is about 14 inches wide (except when Eric Gregg is calling it) and goes only from the batters lower thigh to his belt. When a pitcher does finally hit this spot, balls fly out of the park.
If umpires enforced the strike zone in the baseball rule book (from the midpoint between the top of the uniform pants and the shoulders to the knees), batters would be swinging more, the game would move quicker and it would be an altogether more exciting sport.
Gimmicks are nice, but maybe the game would work a lot better if we just played it by the rules.
