Why MLB offseason desperately needs a pitch clock, too

Baseball saved its season with a pitch clock. Now it needs to apply that concept to the sleepy offseason.

Free agency started last week, but you’d never know it. Whereas the NBA and NFL kick off player movement with feeding frenzies requiring blanket coverage, baseball is content to poke its head out the door in a bathrobe before pulling the shades and crawling back into bed.

Given the excitement generated by deadlines that now exist between every pitch, it shouldn’t take a visionary to recognize the winter needs a similar boost. Former Red Sox president Dave Dombrowski has long advocated for an offseason signing deadline, and perhaps this winter will finally spur MLB to action, because we’re looking at potentially even less action than usual….

A deadline could change that, compressing three months of waiting into one month of excitement. Rather than start free agency five days after the World Series, baseball could take a page from the NFL and NBA and spend the month or so leading into the winter meetings as a build-up before firing the starting pistol. Otherwise, we’re just left with hurry up and wait, a concept the game has finally, belatedly legislated out of existence.