April Madness: Maxed Out

Mookie Betts played the entire game on Tuesday at second base. It wasn’t his first time doing that — he played three full games at second base last September, and played some late-season games at second base for the Dodgers in 2021, too.

Still, it’s kind of fun to see Mookie becoming more and more of a second baseman. He’s still an electrifying, Gold Glove sort of rightfielder, but you just get the feeling that there’s a Joe Morgan kind of second baseman inside him as well. I like seeing him at second.

Before we get to the rest of Tuesday’s takeaways, I’d just like to remind everyone that you can now preorder my new book, WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL, pretty much wherever books are sold. And if you preorder from our good friends at Rainy Day Books, I will inscribe the book with anything you like, up to 130 characters! What a deal!

Back to our new rules update…

Our daily new rules report

I promise we won’t do this report all season long … but I think early on it’s worth looking at how the new rules are impacting the game.

Time of game: On Tuesday, there were 14 games played — and not even one of them went three hours. I can’t even guess when the last time that happened. The average time on Tuesday was a season-low 2 hours, 33 minutes, and that was aided by our first sub-two-hour game of the season. More on that one shortly.

Manny is ejected: During spring training, Manny Machado became the first batter to be charged an automatic strike for not being in the box and alert on time, and he predicted that he would likely run afoul of the pitch timer again. It happened on Tuesday in the oddest way.