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PHOENIX — To the eye of a traditionalist baseball scout, something would have looked amiss at The 60-yard dash, long a staple of the baseball showcase experience akin to the 40-yard dash in football scouting, had gotten a haircut and a facelift. Once upon a time, the running exam was hand-timed by armies of scouts using stopwatches. But those days are long gone.

Instead, all the amateur players at Chase Field ran a 30-yard dash. A player would line up at the start line in a steal position, feet perpendicular to the running lane, right elbow dangling at the ready. A two-foot-long runway stretched from the right-field foul line into the green expanse.



Lining the runway, placed at 5-yard intervals, were electronic sensors topped by circular LED screens that displayed a player’s split times almost instantaneously as he jetted past them. It was all fittingly futuristic, a sign that MLB’s amateur operations staff is trying to adapt to the times. But the biggest, most drastic change to the sprint test was the distance itself.

The 60-yard dash, long the accepted distance by which scouts assessed foot speed, had been chopped in half. For more than 80 years, “the 60” was a crucial part of baseball evaluation. With the explosion of the high school showcase industry in the late 20th century, it only became more essential.

MLB hopefuls trained specifically for the event, trying to get their run times underneath the seven-second mark that most evaluators considered around average.

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