I was also interested in seeing baseball’s new rules applied in the big league setting. The most important change is the imposition of a pitch clock — something I’ve advocated for at least a decade. Pitchers now have 15 seconds to start their delivery unless there are runners on base, in which case they get 20 seconds. …

The benefits of the clock are hard to overstate. I’m accustomed to the first three innings of a major league game taking about an hour pretty consistently.

But when we reached the hour mark on Tuesday, there were two out in the bottom of the fourth.

Arguably, though, the biggest benefit isn’t the shorter elapsed time of the games. It’s the pace of play. The pace is brisk, the way team sports are meant to be played.

Fans — true fans who want to follow the action closely — need to be alert. If you bury your head in your scorecard or peruse the scoreboard, you might well miss something.