1963 was a long time ago.  51 years if you're keeping score.  Gasoline cost 29 cents a gallon.  A new car ran 32 hundred dollars on average.  And a baseball game took 2 hours and 20 minutes to play.
 
These days gasoline is pushing four dollars, a new car is over 28 thousand dollars, and the average baseball game takes 2:58 to play.  That may not seem like a lot but on a percentage basis, it's 27 percent.  The game as it is played today would run 11 1/2 innings in 1963.  Every single game.
 
This has caused some well meaning people within the game to support tinkering with the game.  An unnamed executive suggested reducing the game from nine to seven innings, as they play it in high school and Minor League doubleheaders, would fix everything.  It would give back 39 minutes, but not much else.
 
To start with professional baseball games have been nine innings since the sport gained wide acceptance in the 1880s.  The record book is built on nine inning games.  And the record book is almighty in baseball.  It is why we still consider Babe Ruth the best player of all time.  This despite the fact that Ruth last played in 1935 and has been dead for 66 years.
 
No other major sport in the United States is as attached to its history as baseball.  It would be ludicrous to suggest that any basketball or football player from the 1920s was the best ever.  Neither of those sports were even fully evolved back then.
 
So while it was fun to discuss radical makeovers like reduced innings and perhaps starting every player with a 1-1 count, tricks of the trade at the amateur level, they would never, ever be seriously considered. So let's look at what we can do.
 
There's a rule in the books that says a pitcher has to deliver a ball every 20 seconds.  Make him.  An umpire can deny time-out to a batter if he so choses. Do it.  If a pitch is coming in every 20 seconds, the batter has little time to waste playing with his gloves.
 
Why should a manager or coach be given a little alone time with the pitcher on the mound.  They spend half the game together on the bench.  Surely any true words of wisdom can be imparted then.  Ban the visits.  Take a tip from tennis where players in a match aren't allowed to be coached.
 
In what other sport does the coach appear on the playing area to personally remove a player?  Is the pitcher unable to find the dugout without assistance?  Changing pitchers is no small matter here.  4.8 was the average number pitchers used per game in 1963.  That figure has risen to over seven and a half.  What's the cost in time of three extra pitching changes per game?
 
Limit or eliminate the visits.  Keep the batter in the batters box.  Enforce the twenty second rule.  And everyone will go home happy from a baseball game in well under three hours.