From Pastoral to Precise
Fan Discourse on the Major League Baseball Pitch Clock
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12082202 |
|---|---|
| Authors | L Dugan Nichols (0000-0002-9045-5329, University of New Brunswick, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 1-9 |
| Publication date | 2026-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Sociology of Sport Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0741-1235 • E-ISSN: 1543-2785 |
| Publisher | Human Kinetics (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1123/ssj.2024-0249 |
| OpenAlex | W7148333445 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 18 |
Major League Baseball (MLB) introduced a pitch clock in 2023, forcing players to speed up their motions. This paper first contextualizes the pitch clock as a form of workplace time discipline. Second, it analyzes thousands of reactions on social media to determine how fans interpret the clock. Three prominent themes emerge in their discourse: approval, qualified approval, and disapproval. This paper analyzes these themes and argues that (1) fans often convey audience centrism, whereby positive viewing experiences take precedence over the time discipline of players, (2) many treat baseball as a detached preserve, meaning fans ignore connections to factors outside of sports, and (3) fans exhibit contradictions. For example, traditionalists regularly decry the clock, even though it is shortening games to lengths more common in the 1980s
Forcing (mathematics · League · Meaning (existential · Stadium · American Sports and Literature · Rhetoric and Communication Studies · Sports, Gender, and Society
Using Message Strategies to Attenuate the Effects of Disinformation on Credibility
Baseball and Bioethics Revisited
Sociology of Sport
Reflecting on reflexive thematic analysis
Predictors of Psychedelic Experience
They are used to the traditional ways of doing things”
The Sociology of Sport
Using thematic analysis in psychology
Why We Like to Lose
Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism
The Nested Precarities of Creative Labor on Social Media
Sociology of Sport in the United States
Athletic Labor and Social Reproduction
| Highly cited | No |
|---|