I don’t know if Rob Manfred is the best person to be the new baseball commissioner in the post-Selig Era–maybe too much of an inside man?–but I’m heartened that he and the other candidates focused on speeding up the game, spreading the content better through new platforms and doing a superior job selling the players. (Mike Trout and Andrew McCutchen should be household names even to non-baseball fans.)

On the first item on the list: You can only hasten the game so much because the number of commercials is mind-numbing, but there should be a 15-second pitch clock and a failure to beat the timer resulting in a ball call. Some think this would lead to more pitcher injuries because they’d be rushing, but I doubt it would exacerbate that problem. From Jon Paul Morosi at Fox Sports:

“Ultimately, the owners’ occasionally contentious discussions served a noble purpose: They forced the candidates — and themselves — to confront concerns about baseball among contemporary sports consumers.

The game often moves too slowly, and baseball has lost young fans to other sports — particularly soccer, which fits neatly into two-hour blocks on kid-friendly Saturday and Sunday mornings in the Eastern time zone.

The notion of a ‘pitch clock’ was mentioned during the owners’ conversations this week; old-school types are certain to cringe, but that’s precisely the sort of thing that Manfred will need to consider to ensure baseball’s viability to future generations.

‘Folks see Rob as a person who can take where we are and jump-start it into new dimensions with new ideas, fresh ideas,’ Baer said. ‘We have to figure out ways to make (baseball) relevant to that 12-year-old … We want to make baseball as relevant as possible to them — with their handheld, on television, getting more people playing the sport.'”