It was a nippy April night in Toronto, and while hockey fans mourned the Maple Leafs’ disappointing season, baseball fans at Rogers Centre celebrated the beginning of a promising Blue Jays season. Heading into the seventh inning, the Jays led their division rivals, the Tampa Bay Rays, eleven to three.

The Rays were yearning for a spurt of offense to start an unlikely comeback. For a moment, a comeback looked possible. To start the inning, Rays outfielder Tim Beckham clobbered a rather perfunctory first-pitch slider by Toronto reliever Todd Redmond into deep left field. As the ball rocketed towards the outfield wall, fans and commentators in the crowd exhaled collectively, anticipating Beckham’s second home run of the year, and a seven-run Blue Jays lead instead of eight.

Blue Jays left fielder Kevin Pillar was not so quick to give up on the play. Pillar, feet flying across the artificial turf, dashed towards the wall at full-speed, eyes locked on the bit of white leather bound for the left field bleachers. Then, in a moment of sheer athleticism and perfect timing, Pillar continued his stride up the wall, reached high above, and made a sensational grab, robbing Beckham of his homer.

As Pillar casually descended from the stratosphere, ball secured in glove, chaos ensued. Fans in the stadium went nuts. The commentators for both teams were in utter disbelief. Through the fluidity of the Internet, Pillar’s catch instantly went viral, and authorities on baseball were quick to name it the “Catch of the Year.” The catch was trending on Twitter for a couple of hours. Audience members, fans, aficionados, and casual spectators of the sport were left with one question, “How the hell did he do that?”

Well, for the first time ever, Major League Baseball can tell you exactly how the hell Pillar made the catch. Using “Statcast,” an advanced sports analytics system in its inaugural season, the MLB published a video that deconstructed and provided metrics to every aspect of his catch. Apparently, Pillar’s route to catching the ball was not perfect, as he only had a 97.9% “route efficiency.” He also reached a top speed of 15.2 miles per hour, which is just slightly faster than a trot.

The new system, lauded by the MLB, is a neat little gimmick, but that’s exactly what it is: a gimmick. The human awe and wonder of the catch felt lost to the goofy metrics of the speed of Pillar and the ball, the angle of trajectory, and the speed in which the ball left Beckham’s bat. With Statcast’s absurdly detailed new analysis, fans are left with a new question ringing in their heads, “Who cares?”

This new system is not a revolution of the baseball world, no matter how hard the MLB tries to make the case; Statcast is just another milestone in baseball’s continuous process of quantifying, dissecting, and analyzing every aspect of the sport. This quantification process comes as part of a desperate attempt to appeal to its growingly impatient and demanding audience who want highlight-reel plays, quicker game times, greater catches, and analysis that quenches their insatiable desire to understand the intricacies of the game.

Baseball’s need to reinvent itself appears to be an increasingly necessary move. As fans find instant, unlimited entertainment in other forms through the Internet, baseball falls lower and lower on the list of their priorities. For example, in the first two games of the 2014 World Series between the Kansas City Royals and the San Francisco Giants, broadcasts averaged just around 12.6 million viewers per game; less than twice the combined populations of the metropolitan areas of the contestants’ cities (the San Francisco Bay Area has around five million people; the Kansas City Metropolitan just over two million). The matchup itself was not inherently dull; Kansas City, a Cinderella team making an incredible underdog story, was challenging San Francisco, a dynastic franchise making a bid for its third World Series in three years. The overall fanbase in 2014 was just smaller than it has been in the past. Viewership of the World Series has been steadily decreasing, and has not reached 20 million viewers per game in the past ten years. By contrast, the most watched World Series of all time (the 1978 matchup between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees) averaged over 44 million viewers per game.

Game 1 of the 2014 World Series was the lowest-rated World Series game in history with a TV rating of just 8.0. For context, a 2014 regular season Sunday Night Football game between the Denver Broncos and the San Francisco 49ers scored a rating of 8.2.

Former baseball viewers are now gravitating towards other sports at an increasing rate. A 2014 poll showed that 35% of Americans claim football as their favorite sport, while merely 14% said the same for baseball.

Why the shift in loyalty of game? The issue has to do with the nature of the game itself. For one, it’s known to be incredibly slow, and it’s getting even slower. According to Baseball-Reference.com, the average length of a baseball game in the MLB’s inaugural year (1920) was just one hour and forty-seven minutes. By 1970, the games’ length had grown to two hours and thirty minutes. In 2014, the average length of a game clocked in at an astounding three hours and two minutes. In a society that boasts constant outlets for quick entertainment, long and rambling baseball games simply cannot compete.

Baseball has also lacked offense. Since the turn of the millennium and the end of the dynamic Steroid Era, nearly all offensive stats have decreased. The average batting average has decreased from .270 to just .249; average runs per game have decreased from 5.14 to 4.07. The casual spectator of the game does not have the knowledge or understanding of the game to appreciate a pitching duel. Casual fans want to watch highlight-reel “web gems” of 500-foot home runs and bases-clearing doubles, not a four hour game which ends 1-0.

So how can baseball reinvent itself to appeal to a greater audience? The answer, the MLB has found, is to reinvent the entire nature of the game, and adapt it to an increasingly impatient and technology-oriented audience.

The first major change made to baseball at the start of the 2015 season was the implementation of new “pace of game” rules in minor league theaters. Clocks have been added to all minor league parks, which serve a variety of purposes; they now give pitchers just 20 seconds to throw their pitch after receiving the ball. If they exceed their time limit, the pitch is called a ball. On the opposite end of the pitch, batters are required to keep one foot in the batter’s box during their at-bat (with a few exceptions), thus eliminating the player’s routine of taking lengthy strolls around the plate between pitches. Other changes include decreasing the time between innings to just 2:30 minutes and allowing just three visits to the pitcher’s mound per game. Some of these changes have also been applied to major league games, such as mandating clocks between innings and prohibiting batters from leaving the batter’s box between swings (failure to comply results in a small fine).

The results of these new rules in minor league games have been noticeable, but not significant. According to MLB.com, the average length of games with the full set of new rules has decreased by about 12 minutes. Major league games, following a partial set of the new rules, have decreased 10 minutes.

While the pace-of-play rules have cut down on the meandering slowness of the game, the rules have drawn heavy criticism from baseball officials, fans, and players alike. Jon Lester, the ace pitcher of the Chicago Cubs, disagrees with the new rules, and fears their jump into the major leagues in the coming seasons. “If you [use a pitch clock] you take the beauty out of the game,” he said at a Cubs convention in January. “There’s such a cat-and-mouse game as far as messing up hitters’ timing, messing up pitchers’ timing. Different things that fans and people that have never played this game don’t understand. I feel like if you do add a clock, it just takes all the beauty away from the game. I think you’re going down a path you don’t want to go down.”

Lester makes a compelling point, asking how baseball should be observed. For over a century, baseball has been celebrated for its rambling pace-of- play and its casual atmosphere.