Hey, Fox-TV! Why won’t you show the pitch timer on postseason broadcasts?

They’re the only channel that refuses to do this.

During Game 2 of the NL Division Series between the Padres and Dodgers, Padres righthander Yu Darvish committed a pitch timer violation.

Here it is. It happened on a 1-2 pitch to Freddie Freeman in the first inning.

Now, there was absolutely no doubt about what happened because you can hear plate umpire John Libka loudly yell “Time!” and point at his wrist. Plate umpires wear a device that has haptic feedback so they get a bit of a buzz on their wrist when the pitch timer expires. And if you remember Darvish’s time with the Cubs, he often took a tremendous amount of time between pitches and seems like the kind of guy who might be subject to quite a few violations. Of 268 pitchers who had at least one timer violation this year, he ranked tied for 11th with four. (FWIW, Shōta Imanaga also had four. No other Cubs pitcher had more than one.)

So maybe you might have expected a violation from Darvish. Unfortunately, you, the postgame TV viewer, had no idea that specific incident was going to happen because, well, Fox-TV refuses to put the pitch timer on its scorebug, shown at the top of this post and on the video clip.

Every other channel that carries baseball puts the pitch timer on their scorebug. The two other channels that have carried postseason games do it.

ESPN

(It’s the “7” at the bottom right.)

TBS

(You can clearly see the countdown below the count.)

Every channel that carries regular season games posts the timer for viewers. For example:

Marquee Sports Network

In fact, Marquee’s scorebug is one of the best in the sport. It doesn’t take up much screen real estate, has all the info needed, and good contrasting colors make it easy to read.

NBC Sports Chicago, now gone, not only put the timer on its scorebug, but also superimposed on the field next to the pitcher’s mound:

You can go through clips of every other local channel if you want; I did, though I’m not posting them all here. Every one of them puts the timer on their scorebug.

In my view, this is just common courtesy to you, the fan viewing the game. If you are at the ballpark, the pitch timer is easily viewable from almost every seat. It’s not something you look at all the time, but speaking personally, if I’m watching a game either in person or on TV, if it feels like the pitcher is taking a long time preparing to pitch, I’ll glance at the timer to see if it’s getting close to zero. That way, I can be better informed about what’s about to happen in the game.

Except watching games on Fox, I can’t do that, because they refuse to show the clock on their scorebug, or anywhere else on the screen. It’s true that there have been many fewer timer violations as pitchers have become accustomed to it. Per this AP article, there were only 602 violations in 2024, while there were a total of 709,648 pitches thrown this year, so that’s less than one-tenth of one percent. (The Cubs had 16, 12 by pitchers, three by batter and one by a catcher). That’s down from 1,048 last year.

So if you’re thinking, “This isn’t a big deal,” no, it’s not. And yet, as a courtesy, every TV channel covering baseball gives the viewer the timer, because it’s part of the rules of the game, just so that people watching games can be better informed.

Why won’t you do it, Fox?