WATCH OUT, TIMMY

Major League Baseball Warns Slow Bat Boys and Girls: You’re on Thin Ice

How do you speed up baseball games? Tell the teens you use to collect equipment that they’ll be given performance reviews, of course.

Imagine you’re a 14-year-old who loves nothing more than your job collecting and carrying the baseball bats for your favorite major league team. Now, what’s the one thing that could make that minimum-wage gig even better? If you guessed “performance reviews,” you’d be wrong—but you’d be in good company, as that’s what Major League Baseball seems to think, too. As part of its ongoing effort to shave precious minutes off its game times, league leaders on Wednesday distributed a memo outlining several protocol changes designed to increase the pace of play. By far the strangest part of the memo, though, was the section putting its bat boys and girls on notice. “New standards will be enforced for bat boys and bat girls, whose ability to quickly retrieve equipment will help efforts to speed up the game,” the memo read, according to ESPN. “The league will evaluate the performances of bat boys and bat girls and could ask teams to replace them if their performance is considered substandard.”