Tuesday night, the best players in Major League Baseball will gather for the 2017 All-Star Game. For the first time in 15 years, the winning team will not be earning home-field advantage for its league’s representative in the World Series.

It was the right call. The “this time it counts” concept didn’t actually make the Midsummer Classic any more exciting. All it meant is that a pitcher, like Steven Wright last season, was kept out of the game in case it went to extra innings. It was a bad idea with worse execution.

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has shown a willingness to make dramatic changes to the game, and has hinted that more are coming. He is keenly aware that the national pastime is having trouble connecting with millennials and is facing sagging television ratings. He has created a committee that will look into speeding up the pace of play, with the hope that less down time will lead to more interest from the younger demographic.

With that in mind, here is my five-step program to improve the pace of major league baseball and make the game a more exciting program:

• Pitch clocks. Minor-league baseball has had much success with the 20-second clocks. During the first season of use, in 2015, game times decreased by 12 minutes from the previous year. It’s simple, it’s effective and it’s time to put pitchers on the clock in the majors.

• Shorter commercial breaks. My employer, NESN, won’t like this, but the game should take 30 seconds out of its between-inning breaks. There are ample ways to make up for the lost commercial inventory, like increasing ad costs when ratings go up. Taking a half minute out of 18 breaks saves you another nine minutes.

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• No free mound visits. There is absolutely no reason a manager, coach or catcher should be allowed to saunter out to the mound to have a chat with the pitcher. These mound visits are essentially time outs, so let’s treat them as such. Follow the lead of every other sport and limit the number of timeouts per game. Give a team three or four timeouts, and let people talk to the pitcher. That’s all you get.

• Fewer warmup pitches. There’s no reason a pitcher needs a minimum number of pitches when he comes into a game. Be ready in the bullpen. Take two or three pitches from the mound to get a feel for it. Then let’s play ball.

• Relief pitchers cannot come into the game to face one batter, unless it’s the last batter of an inning. This will get away from the left-right-left matchups that bring the game to a crawl. If you’re coming in to face a batter, you’re coming in to face at least two. Late-inning situations are the best moments in a game. Let’s have them play out without three commercial breaks around three batters.

There you have it. A simple plan that will help shorten the length of games. More importantly the plan limits the amount of down time during the game. We’ve seen exciting games that last four hours, and horribly boring games that are over by 9:30 p.m.

This plan doesn’t fundamentally change the way the game is played, with the exception of the usage of relief pitchers. And even that is bringing the game back to the way it was played before the age of relief specialization.

There’s nothing wrong with the game of baseball. It just needs to be repackaged so the next generation of potential fans can see how great it is.

In the meantime, enjoy the All-Star Game. This time, it doesn’t count.

That, like the five suggestions listed here, is an idea whose time has come.

Tom Caron is a studio host for the Red Sox broadcast on NESN. His column appears in the Portland Press Herald on Tuesdays.


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