The website of the independent Atlantic League invites viewers to contribute to an ongoing, seemingly irresolvable baseball problem. “Do you have a suggestion?” the site asks. “Share it with us here.”

The problem the league seeks to solve is the length of games. Call it time of game, call it pace of games. Officials and fans think games are too long and want Major League Baseball to implement steps to shorten them.

This season’s 2,430 games, according to the commissioner’s office, averaged 3 hours and 2 minutes, the first time a season average reached 3 hours and the fourth consecutive year the average rose. That’s not the direction anyone wanted to go.

However, with a simple calculation from Bob Waterman of Elias Sports Bureau I can shave about 10 minutes off the average time of game, and pitchers can shorten games even more by working more efficiently, meaning throwing more strikes and fewer pitches.

“Roughly 300 pitches are thrown in a game,” Waterman said. “All it takes at that number of pitches is an extra two seconds between pitches on average and you’ve increased the game time by 600 seconds or 10 minutes.”

Waterman said another second or two per pitch is added when the catcher looks into the dugout for a sign from the manager or a coach to give the pitcher. “The second or two he’s looking and the manager is giving him a sign slows down the process,” one of Elias’ outstanding statisticians said.

The average number of pitches this year, Waterman added, was 290. That average hasn’t changed much over the years. Elias records show the average, rounded off, was 294 in 2000, 293 in 2004, 295 in 2009 and 292 in 2013.

Those numbers indicate there’s not much hope that pitchers can reduce their number of pitches. One of the great failures in today’s game, I believe, is pitchers’ inability to throw strikes and use fewer pitches to retire batters.

Limited by pitch counts, one of the worst developments in the game, pitchers have to learn to get batters out with fewer pitches. It’s abominable when a pitcher reaches the end of the fifth inning having thrown 90 pitches.

If they could retire batters with fewer pitches, they would help shorten games and they would help themselves as well. They might actually be able to get through six innings, maybe even seven. What a novelty that would be.

Commissioner Bud Selig has not urged managers and pitching coaches to get their pitchers to improve their pitching efficiency. That improvement will not be part of Selig’s legacy.

As principal owner of the Milwaukee Brewers and then commissioner, Selig has been in baseball for 45 years. In that time, he has seen the time of game rise from about two hours and 15 minutes a game to more than three hours.

On Sept. 22 Selig named a “new pace of game committee” whose recommendations will be tried in the Arizona Fall League. It’s a new pace of game committee as opposed to the pace of game committee that Selig created six years ago or so. Nothing, however, came out of that committee’s deliberations, and the average time of game has risen by about 12 minutes.

The problem with the new committee is that it has started out behind. The Atlantic League has already done MLB’s work for it. Rick White, the league president and a former MLB executive, was more aggressive in the matter than Selig.

Last June White formed a “pace of play” committee with Tal Smith, a former major league executive; Hall-of-Fame executive Pat Gillick, former general managers Roland Hemond and Joe Klein and former players Sparky Lyle, Bud Harrelson and Cecil Cooper.

Unlike MLB committees, White’s committee worked quickly and diligently enough to be able to implement five initiatives for the latter part of the season:

• On-field conferences involving a pitcher are limited to three, each limited to 45 seconds, though removal of a pitcher would not count as one.
• Umpires enforce rules against batters stepping out of batter’s box and requiring pitchers to deliver pitches within 12 seconds when no runner is on base.
• Umpires control pace of play and as part of that responsibility call strikes as defined in the rule book.
• Number of pitchers’ warm-up pitches is reduced from eight to six.
• Intentional walks are awarded automatically without four balls being thrown.

White said in a telephone interview that a sixth initiative was considered but not implemented. It would have called for use of a runner for a catcher who reached base with one or two outs.

“Concern was expressed by managers, coaches and players about replacing the catcher,” White said. “There were two objections. Many players had major league experience and want to get back. They felt players would be hurt by it. They were also concerned this was changing the complexion of the game.”

With the adoption of the pace-of-play initiatives, White said, “two weekends ago, we saw a drop of about eight minutes. We dropped 10 minutes in the first half but slipped in the second half. We came away from this with a marvelous body of data. We apprised Major League Baseball of what we were doing.”

White said he expected the league’s board of directors to adopt the five tested initiatives for next season and added that the committee is evaluating 15 additional initiatives.

The news release announcing MLB’s plans for the Arizona Fall League didn’t acknowledge the Atlantic League experience, but with a couple of exceptions seemed like a copy of the independent league’s trial.

MLB is trying many of the same ideas, including the limit of three on-field conferences or timeouts.

In addition, MLB will limit time between innings to two minutes and five seconds and time for pitching changes to two minutes and 30 seconds.

Like the Atlantic League, MLB will experiment with the no-pitch intentional walk but obviously has to keep in mind the play in the Giants-Nationals clinching division-series game in which Buster Posey was out at home plate when he tried to score on Aaron Barrett’s errant pitch as he tried to walk Pablo Sandoval intentionally.