Opening Day: How the MLB pitch clock became a batter’s problem

(CNN) Fidgeting with batting gloves between pitches. Scrawling in the dirt with the tip of a baseball bat. Pacing — and maybe meditating — around the batter’s box.

Major League Baseball hitters used to have all the time in the world for such rituals before feeling ready and confident to face pitchers.

But the league’s new pitch clock rules, introduced this year to accelerate a game that can bleed into three hours, will result in another unintended casualty: quirky batter routines.

“It’s called a pitch timer, and because of that, I think when they announced it, most people thought about how it affects the pitcher,” MLB.com national reporter Anthony Castrovince told CNN.

As spring training got underway, the new rule appeared to be achieving its goal of speeding up games. But baseball experts also began to realize that the burden of the clock might be more of an adjustment for the batters than the pitchers.

“The batters having not as much time as they were used to was one of those things that snuck up on everybody involved because we focused so much on the pitchers,” Neil Paine, acting sports editor at FiveThirtyEight, told CNN. “We didn’t really spend as much time thinking about the batters, and as it turns out, the batters have had to make as much of an adjustment as the pitchers it seems like.”

The new pitch clock rules state that a pitcher gets 15 seconds to begin the motion…