As we count down to Spring Training, here’s the third installment of my ’10 Things I’m Watching In 2015′ series. Today’s focus dips into the Minor Leagues and the pitch clocks that will be featured in AA and Triple-A games.

Pace of play and pitch clocks have been discussed a lot over the past few months and although there won’t be any “20 second clocks” in the big leagues this year, this is still a storyline worth monitoring.

As baseball continues to look for ways to speed up the game and increase the fan experience, pitch clocks will be utilized in both AA and Triple-A games this season. This is a significant step because it shows that after experimenting with pitch clocks in the Arizona Fall League, baseball liked what it saw enough to continue with the new rules.

“It’s something that we’d certainly like to see more testing done with,” Joe Torre, Major League Baseball’s executive vice president of baseball operations, said at the Winter Meetings. “I was never a proponent of introducing the clock in baseball, but I went out [to the AFL], and I was pretty impressed. [The clock] was there, but it really wasn’t intrusive in any way.”

Pitch clocks were enforced at 16 AFL games and the average time of those games was two hours and 42 minutes – 10 minutes quicker than the average AFL game time in 2013.

The use of the pitch clock had a noticeable impact on the pace of the game and if the experiment in the minors goes well, changes may be coming to the majors over the next few seasons.

Pitch clocks have generated a lot of controversy among baseball purists who don’t want to change the way the game has always been played.

However games are getting longer and it would likely be in baseball’s best interest to tackle the pace of play issue sooner – while it is just a minor annoyance – rather than later – when it truly becomes a problem.

Having watched multiple Arizona Fall League games in which the pitch clock was enforced, I came away impressed. The game was noticeably faster and although it felt rushed at time (the system does need fine tuning) it was also an enjoyable experience to watch baseball played at such a crisp pace.

The AFL was a cool experience, but the Minor Leagues will provide baseball with a much larger sample size to evaluate and I’m more than anxious to see how it all plays out.

Recap of previous entries:
San Francisco Giants
Chicago Cubs