South Carolina catchers won’t be getting a crick in their necks anytime soon.
Thanks to a rule change that allows pitching coaches and catchers to communicate via an earpiece, limiting the lookovers to the dugout during games.
Other than not giving catchers’ neck muscles a workout, there hasn’t been much to come out of the rule change, according to Mark Kingston.
“Truthfully I think it’s been a non-factor,” he said. “It hasn’t taken off any times in the games, and I think that was the original intent was to shave times of games down. I don’t know if it’s had a significant impact of that.”
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The rule change comes after game times reached a full three hours and 19 minutes in 2015, up almost 30 minutes from the previous year.
First came the pitch clock, and now trying to speed up the pitch signaling to decrease dead time between pitches.
The Gamecocks have played 29 games this year, 15 of which have been over three hours. Their last game, an 11-3 loss to North Carolina, was one minute shy of the team’s first four-hour game of the year.
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The average game time for South Carolina this season is right around three hours and four minutes.
While it may have done that in some cases, South Carolina isn’t really seeing the benefits right now but one catcher seems to like the new change.
“With everything they want to do to speed up the game, I think that’s a big step in the right direction to do that,” Hunter Taylor said. “It makes it a lot quicker. I don’t have to look over every time. (Skylar Meade) tells me (the pitch) and I can look down.”
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There’s still a ways to go in getting fully adjusted to the new way of calling pitches in the SEC, but right now it’s not having an impact on game times for Kingston and his team.
“I was hoping it’d shave more time in games, but our games seem to still be too long," Kingston said. "I don’t know why that is. I think that part’s been fine—it eliminates some sign stealing that can go on in games.”
