Fox-TV has added the pitch timer to its scorebug

… which is a useful thing to have, if you want to keep track.

Earlier in this postseason, I wrote this article about Fox-TV’s failure to include the pitch timer on its scorebug. The other national channels carrying postseason baseball, ESPN and TBS, include it, as does every channel carrying regular-season baseball.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one wanting to see Fox add the timer to its scorebug. During the first inning of Game 2 of the World Series, I noticed that Dodgers starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto appeared to be working fairly slowly. So I thought, “Hey, it would be good to see the pitch timer countdown.”

Lo and behold, there it was!

Fox-TV

This was during Aaron Judge’s at-bat in the first inning, on what proved to be the pitch on which Yamamoto struck him out:

The timer pops up above the rest of the bug, in the upper right corner, when three seconds remain. In a perfect world, I’d like to see at least a countdown from five seconds, but three is better than none. As you can see, it takes up almost no screen real estate and disappears as soon as the pitcher begins his motion. That’s the same way it would turn off at the ballpark.

It’s there if you want to take a glance if, as in a situation like this, it appears that the pitcher is working slowly. And if you don’t, it’s pretty unobtrusive. It doesn’t show on this clip, but if the timer gets down to two seconds, it turns red.

Thanks, Fox, for listening to fan comments and adding the pitch timer. It’s part of the rules of the game and it’s a useful thing for fans to be able to keep track of, if they want to. There were a number of pitch timer violations in the earlier rounds of the postseason — this way, if that happens during the World Series, TV viewers will know right away.