Dix Hills firefighter is on the clock — the pitch clock
Howard Kaplan, seen with his daughter Elyssa Kaplan, runs the pitch clock for Major League Baseball for Mets games at Citi Field. They are also firefighters with the Dix Hills Fire Department. Credit: Newsday / David Lennon
Go to Citi Field or Yankee Stadium and you’ll see MLB’s pitch clocks prominently displayed, whether affixed to the backstop wall or beneath the centerfield scoreboard.
The sport’s newest innovation, a revolutionary new rule that has transformed how baseball is played and viewed by fans, is on the minds of virtually everyone inside these stadiums.
But none more so than a Dix Hills firefighter who is mostly out of sight, perched in the second or third row of the press box. Quite literally, the man with his finger on the button. Controlling when Max Scherzer or Gerrit Cole needs to deliver a pitch.
Wait, what? Time out for a second. A fireman does that? From Long Island?
Yep. That’s Howard Kaplan, 57, the guy who runs the pitch clock at major-league ballparks by night and helps with any number of emergencies by — well, later at night. Maybe even that same night. Depending if his pager goes off during the drive home as he crosses the town border.
But a year ago, at least on a few occasions, Kaplan, then an official scorekeeper before the advent of the pitch clock, wasn’t alone taking the postgame detour. That’s because his daughter, Elyssa, also was at the stadium, doing data operations for MLB. And yes, she’s a Dix Hills firefighter, too.
“Last year was a really cool experience that we got to work games together,” said Elyssa, 28, who now is a coordinator in the baseball communications department for the Phillies. “We’d carpool to games, so on the way back, we’d carpool to the firehouse.”
Howard Kaplan with his daughter Elyssa Kaplan. Credit: Elyssa Kaplan/Dix Hills FD
While most fathers and daughters might be rehashing game details on those trips home from Flushing or the Bronx, for Howard and Elyssa, it was game-planning for whatever crisis awaited them in Dix Hills. But it’s not as if the Kaplans are rookies at this. Last year was really the first season they shared a press box for professional reasons, but going on firehouse calls together wasn’t unusual by then.
“There’s been some crazy times where I’ve gone to the fire department on an alarm, growing up in high school and college, where I’ve gone to the fire department on an alarm driving myself there,” said Elyssa, who went to Half Hollow Hills East and the University of New Haven. “Then I get in the truck, we’re on the way to a call, it could take me 10 minutes to realize he’s in the fire truck with me because he’s driving and I’m paying attention to what I have to do in the back.”
Howard got Elyssa into firefighting. He completed his training not long after 9/11 and she’s been hanging around the firehouse since the age of 6 (right around the time Dad showed her how to keep a baseball scorecard). But Elyssa is the one who got her father into the major leagues.
Howard already had a sports background, getting involved with scorekeeping and official stats for his alma mater C.W. Post (now LIU), where he branched out from basketball to football to lacrosse and PA duties at games (his own parents had since sold their office cleaning business).
A pitch clock is deployed to restrict pitcher preparation times during a minor league game between the Brooklyn Cyclones and Greensboro Grasshoppers in 2022 in Coney Island. Credit: AP / John Minchillo
He soon wound up getting involved with the school’s baseball team, too. From those connections came working for the Brooklyn Cyclones and Long Island Ducks, But in the winter of 2021, it was Elyssa, after working that summer for the Orioles, who saw an opening in New York for an MLB scorekeeper. Knowing her dad was a natural for the gig, she sent him the notice.
“It was perfect,” Howard said.
Obviously, this isn’t like keeping a book at your kid’s Little League game. Official scoring decisions aren’t always high-profile, but it’s a responsibility that can attract plenty of attention and impact a player’s career, based on the statistical outcomes. That carries a certain degree of stress, and MLB then turned up the dial a little more when Howard was asked to take part in the pitch-clock training as well.
This was not a duty that MLB took lightly. Commissioner Rob Manfred had battled the Players Association for the past decade in trying to use a pitch clock to quicken the pace of games, and once it finally got approved, there was immense pressure on MLB to make sure the radical transition went as smoothly as possible this season.
Not only was the clock tested in the minors, but the operators were schooled at offseason camps in Houston, where they practiced on the timer’s consoles in coordination with the umpiring crews for up to three college games per day. After that, the clock operators were sent to spring training in either Florida or Arizona to get up to major league-ready speed, just like the players.
On this surface, this may not seem very complicated. Everyone sees the clock counting down in plain sight — 15 seconds with the bases empty, 20 with a runner on — but there are plenty of highly scrutinized moving pieces. Howard, as a clock operator, has to consult with the umpiring crew before each game to go over their signals for the timers, and he’s on a headset throughout the game with MLB officials.
For a sport in which you once could go for coffee between pitches, now it feels as if you don’t have the opportunity to blink. Not for the people monitoring the clock, anyway. And messing up on this stage, with a rule that still infuriates some players, isn’t really an option. You don’t want a do-over. In that regard, it shares some similarity with firefighting.
To date, the pitch clock has been an overwhelming success, performing up to MLB’s most optimistic projections. Through Wednesday, the average time of a nine-inning game was 2 hours, 38 minutes, down from 3:05 a year ago on this date.
As far as new rules go, Howard drew comparisons between lowering the mound after the “Year of the Pitcher” season of 1968 and the introduction of the DH to the American League in 1973. Having some role in a big change is no small thing.
“You want to make sure you do a good job,” Howard said.
From the outside, you would think baseball is the fun part of this unique father-daughter team-up. But talk to them about their roles at the Dix Hills fire department — which has 180 volunteers covering one of the largest areas by square mileage in the state — and the camaraderie there isn’t much different from a sports team. Or the connection to one another. Elyssa described it as their extended family.
“You have to be able to trust everybody,” Howard said. “I’m trusting that we’re going into a fire and that person’s going to be behind me, and the next one behind them, and we’re all going to move into it together and know what we need to do to put that fire out.”
Howard and Elyssa don’t get to do that quite as much lately since she began working with the Phillies, but the firehouse pager is on when she visits back home or the team is in New York. The games are shorter now because of the pitch clock, but the nights for a father-daughter firefighting duo still can stretch long into the next morning. And there could be a different person at the wheel these days.
“He taught me how to drive a fire truck,” Elyssa said.
Always better to be faster operating one of those, too.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
