Statistics you Likely Never Heard About nor Care to Hear About

PPTV, CPTV or DSV.  Have you ever heard of any of these acronyms?  Neither have we.  No, they are not new variants of Covid nor are they government agencies.  Do not feel bad, we didn’t know what these stood for before we started researching pitch clock related violations.

The pitch clock has sprouted a number of new violations that the league and the teams now track.  In addition, to the ones listed above, here are the definitions for all new related pitch clock violations:

• PPTV: Pitcher Pitch Timer Violation
• CPTV: Catcher Pitch Timer Violation – catcher must be in box within nine seconds on timer or batter assessed a ball
• DGV: Disengagement Violation – automatic balk
• DSV: Defensive Shift Violation – automatic ball and
• BPTV: Batter Pitch Timer Violation – batter must be in batter’s box within eight seconds on timer or assessed a strike
• BAST: Batter Attempted Second Timeout – batter assessed a strike if requesting more than one timeout per at-bat

As per Baseball Savant the table below represents a summary of violations by all teams.  As of August 5, 2023 there were a total of 864 violations.

These 864 violations represent about three games of pitches, since an average MLB game contains about 280 pitches per game.  The season is about 70% complete at this point, but extrapolating this out we expect approximately 1,230 violations for this full season.  The counter argument would be that since this is the first season of the pitch clock, violations will go down in the following years as players get accustomed to this new rule and do a better job of avoiding such infractions.

The key takeaway for us here at BP is that none of these violations resulting in an automatic ball, strike, or in some instances a balk, is the result of any action in the field.  They are simply a violation of a timer, so there is no on field action for fans.  This is more just procedural and administrative.  What is the fun in that?

The lack of game action decreases even further if we take into account that MLB changed the intentional walk rule in prior years to eliminate the pitcher throwing four balls for the batter to earn first base, which is now just the manager signaling the umpire to give the batter an intentional pass.  This we previously showed in our post about intentional walks, which noted a total of 475 free passes in 2022.

Therefore, although the pitch clock has indeed shortened the game, has it increased the on field action for the fans?  That point is debatable.  Furthermore, we look forward to the eventual point in time when a game is decided not based upon a play in the field, but by some type of pitch clock violation.   It is only a question of when and not if at this point.