On Friday, Corey Seager hit a game-tying home run in the ninth inning of a World Series game. The crowd was pretty loud about that. Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo—who was sad, and thus less prone to exaggeration than the other side might have been—said it was “easily” the loudest crowd he’d ever heard. Easily! Comparing noises across space and time seems very imprecise, so imagine how much louder this must have been for Lovullo to have stressed the “easily.”
Seager crossed home plate, slapped 10 high-fives before he even reached the dugout, then descended into a clot of remaining teammates. He fived his way through the rest of the roster, the Texas crowd screaming around him the whole time, all of it the loudest thing Torey Lovullo had ever heard.
And then, suddenly, with the crowd still VERY loud, the broadcast switched back to the center field camera, to show Diamondbacks pitcher Paul Sewald throwing a sweeper for a called strike one. Immediately, everything went shhhhhhhhh—relatively speaking, at least. We were back to business.
“That sucks,” I said.
I had a suspicion, and I reviewed the tape closely from many angles and, yes, there it is:
Ah. A limit to how much joy. It took a year, but I found my first small beef with the pitch clock.
How Long It Takes For Such A Home Run’s Celebration To Feel Right
We all have mental clocks, paced by experience. My mental clock knows that the noise from a World Series game-tying home run in the bottom of the ninth inning should last longer than what I’d just heard.
How long, precisely?
In 2015, in a nearly identical situation—bottom of the ninth, one out, Game 1 of the World Series—Alex Gordon homered to tie it up. Shortly after Gordon crossed the plate, Mets pitcher Jeurys Familia had climbed back on the mound, staring in, waiting to throw. But the Royals couldn’t be sped up. Paulo Orlando took his time getting into the box. By the time Familia finally got to throw there had been 70 seconds of pandemonium—21 seconds of Gordon’s trot, plus 49 seconds after crossed the plate. The Kauffman Stadium fan noise had had time to travel across 600 square miles of the Midwest.
Finally Orlando stepped in, Familia threw a pitch, Orlando bunted right through it, and the crowd noise more or less stopped.
When Rajai Davis hit his home run against Aroldis Chapman in the 2016 World Series, he got 68 seconds in the center of the universe—18 in his trot, 50 in the dugout. Cleveland’s end-of-the-world crowd noise dominated the broadcast as Fox showed Davis celebrating with his teammates, then four replays of the blast, then a shot of Davis panting in the dugout, and finally Chapman throwing a pitch.
So that’s our estimate: The standard home run celebration in a life-defining moment used to take around 70 seconds, with around 50 of those seconds coming after the batter crossed home. Even in the 2020 World Series, in front of a half-empty neutral-site crowd, Brandon Lowe’s HUGE 3-Run Jack was permitted 65 seconds (21 trot, 44 aftermath) in the spotlight—and that one came in the sixth inning, not the ninth. That’s probably the least our neural pathways expect in moments like these.
The maximum length of celebration that we might accept, and that a crowd is capable of continuing, is much longer. David Ortiz’ bullpen cop grand slam in the 2013 ALCS ended up producing an extraordinarily long ovation, thanks to a delay on the field. As Tigers outfielder Torii Hunter got some attention from his trainer, the crowd just kept screaming. The extended moment was useful; not only do I remember that home run better than… any? home run in LCS history, but after 90 seconds the Fenway crowd was finally able to coax Ortiz out for a curtain call.
In all, it would take two minutes and two seconds before Joaquín Benoit got to throw the next pitch in that game, and to my ear the Fenway fan volume1 never really dropped until he did.
How Can We Get These Extra Seconds Back?
There have been four non-walkoff home runs this postseason that merit such a celebration, with home fans. One was Austin Riley’s lead-taking home run in the eighth inning of an NLDS game. The clock is ticking ominously behind Riley as he and his teammates bash their smashsticks together,
unhelpfully reminding us that this (TICK) too (TICK) shall (TICK) pass (TICK). Fortunately, though, the Phillies chose that moment to make a pitching change, and the clock was shut off. We got our 70 seconds after all, culminating in an Austin Riley curtain call that would have been preempted 15 seconds earlier had the pitch clock had its say.
Another was Alek Thomas’ game-tying home run against Craig Kimbrel in NLCS Game 4. The pitch clock brightened to life and started winding down as soon as Thomas crossed home plate. Then Thomas went into the dugout, accepted some heartfelt congratulations,
and when he emerged the pitch clock had somehow been reset. It’s impossible to tell how. We can see in video shot by a fan that it was still ticking down to the 15-second mark, but long after those 15 seconds had passed Kimbrel still hadn’t pitched. A completely different countdown finally showed up on the broadcast scorebug. My guess is that the Diamondbacks’ next batter, Geraldo Perdomo, reset it by using his timeout.
Presuming that’s what happened, Perdomo found one way to give fans back their 20 seconds. Batters don’t generally like to use their only allotted timeout early in a plate appearance, and that’s probably extra true when they’re walking into one of the highest-stakes at-bats of their lives. If Perdomo did sacrifice his timeout for the moment, I’m grateful. Right choice.
The other way the hitting team can extend the moment is by extending the home run trot. The clock doesn’t start until the hitter touches home plate. For that brief window that he’s rounding the bases, life’s pace is his to control. Batters in these extremely high-emotion home run moments tend to speed up—Alek Thomas spun around the bases in 21 seconds, Alex Gordon in 21 seconds, Rajai Davis in 18 seconds, George Springer (in the 2017 World Series) in 19 seconds, Raul Ibanez (in the 2012 ALCS) in 18 seconds. Those trots are flying. But there is another way to do it.
Batters in 2023 and beyond could do what Bryce Harper did in the 2022 NLCS, when (with no pitch clock motivation, just an appreciation for the moment) he took what’s probably the slowest trot of his life, 31 seconds.
He took his time to get going, acknowledged the crowd as he reached the middle of the field, then slowed even further for the final 90 feet, letting a crowd that couldn’t have been louder cheer him home.
That’s more or less what Adolis García did, too, in his ALCS home run against Justin Verlander this year.
His circuit took about 30 seconds, as he waited ~10 seconds to begin trotting and then even held back his last step onto home plate, like a singer holding a final note. (The split-second he touches home, the clock comes alive, and 24 seconds later Justin Verlander pitched.) A ballplayer with some imagination and some nerves could conceivably extend that trot to 35 seconds—heck, maybe longer—before the 30-second pitch clock starts ticking. That gets us close to something that will satisfy my mental clock.
But the best solution here is for the people who run things to just not start the clock during the, oh, 20 situations a year when such crowd noise exists. The Field Timing Coordinator should just forget to push the button when the moment is that large. Or the umpire should send a signal to the FTC to start it all over when something special is happening. Or the league should send out a memo that states it’s okay, every once in a while, to just let the atmosphere decide, this being an entertainment event and these few seconds being literally the greatest few seconds of several thousands of people’s lives. The memo can appear under the title If This Stadium’s A-Rockin’, Don’t Come A-Clockin’. I give them that memo title, free of charge. Just let the fans cheer, let a home venue assert itself, and let a moment be.
Torey Lovullo, incidentally, was at this one.
I certainly feel the same rule should apply milestone round number achievements for example, if kershaw stays on and gets his 3000th k.
I love the Paulo Orlando reference — one of the 5 Brazilian major leaguers in history and one of the 2 Brazilian World Series champions in history.