MLB looking at possible limits on the use of relief pitchers

Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred acknowledged that MLB is looking at possibly limiting the use of relief pitchers in games.

Manfred was a guest Thursday on ESPN's Mike & Mike Show where he was presented nine suggestions from fans for improving baseball. One suggestion was some sort of restrictions on the use of relief pitching in an inning or game.

"I am in favor of something like that," Manfred said. "We (MLB) spend a ton of time on this issue in the last few months."

" You know the problem with relief pitchers is that they're so good. I've got nothing against relief pitchers but they do two things to the game; the pitching changes themselves slow the game down and our relief pitchers have become so dominate at the back end that they actually rob action out of the end of the game, the last few innings of the game. So relief pitchers is a topic that is under active consideration. We're talking about that a lot internally."

This year, the average time of games is 3 hours and 4 minutes. By comparison, in 2005 games averaged two hours, 49 minutes.