JUPITER, Fla. — With the clock ticking, Cardinals veteran Adam Wainwright engaged the pitching rubber with his cleat and prepared Saturday to throw the first pitch of his 500-start professional career that had a timer on it.

All he needed was catcher Willson Contreras to punch in the pitch call with the wireless tech used to relay signs now, and their Grapefruit League opener, the first game for the Cardinals under a slate of new Major League Baseball, would begin.

The speaker tucked into Wainwright’s hatband whispered an automated voice.

“Fastball,” it began. “Do---”

It went dead.

The first day of speeding up the game began with a delay.

The PitchCom system stuck to Contreras’ kneepad had gone dead in the middle of giving Wainwright the location for the pitch. That pushed the start of the game back three minutes as Contreras affixed a new device and tried again: “Fastball, down.” And they were off. With the bases empty Wainwright had 15 seconds after receiving the baseball to begin his delivery. Hitters have eight of those seconds to be ready and alert in the box. Wainwright had 30 seconds between batters, and only a few times caught himself going through a trusted routine only to see the clock nearing zero.

“The hitters — they’re routines have got to be quick,” Wainwright said. “It happened to me to start the inning. I got down to my last two seconds in the second inning. I do this big breathing pattern before I get on the mound to get my focus and center going where I want it going. And then I get on the mound. I started to do it, and as I looked up I had four seconds. Just made the pitch.

“I didn’t feel rushed a whole lot,” he continued. “There were a few times where I was, ‘OK, I better get on the mound.’”

Wainwright benefited from the clock when Nationals batter Yadiel Hernandez was not ready for a pitch and the umpire called a strike on him, per rule. Cardinals outfielder Lars Nootbaar received a ball later in the game when the pitcher did not begin his delivery in time. The clock gave the game a peppier pace, and the Cardinals’ 3-2 loss was played in 2 hours, 26 minutes. The first 19 games played in the Cactus and Grapefruit leagues on Saturday averaged 2 hours, 37 minutes.

The Cardinals first nine games of 2022 spring averages 2 hours, 57 minutes.

The Dodgers and Brewers played a game in Arizona on Saturday that featured 11 runs and 15 hits, and it was finished in 2 hours, 21 minutes.

“A faster game,” manager Oliver Marmol said. “It will have a real impact on the length of the game. How much? We’ll see.”

The pitch clock was the omnipresent of the rule changes as it measured every event on the field. The other new rules had their cameos. Paul Goldschmidt skipped a grounder down the third-base line that clipped the bigger base and bounded for a double. Wainwright allowed a single up the middle in the second inning that, if an infield shift was still permissible would have been a groundout.

He remains a fan of outlawing the shift as baseball has done.

“It was a ‘doinker’ grounder through the infield,” Wainwright said. “The ones that really bother you are the ones where you make a perfect pitch and he hits a 16-hopper, scores two runs, where there’s been somebody for 150 years. The line drive that comes past your eyes that’s 106 mph that somebody catches — you like those. You like outs. That’s fine. But you made a terrible pitch. He hit it 106. It should be a base hit. If I throw a great pitch and he hits it where I want him to hit it, splitting the bases on either side, I want an out there.”

Wainwright made one attempted pickoff and was never tempted to get close to the limit on two attempts. If a pitcher makes a third attempt, the batter must be out or a balk is awarded.

Contreras did try at least two back-picks with throws to first. When he was a Cub, the Cardinals knew to return to first because of Contreras’ eagerness to try a back-pick, and they now think it’s a way for them to curtail the running game with the pitch clock and limited pickoffs. It could also be used as a go-between to buy the pitcher a few more seconds.

Major League Baseball has urged players to use that sparingly.

“The one I don’t like, seemingly, is the two-pickoff rule,” Wainwright said. “I don’t like that at all. I don’t like the runner knowing for sure. Bigger bases and they know when to go based off of the clock. They can get a great jump already if you hold it long enough. They can know exactly when they can run. Seems like a (goofy) rule to me.”

Goldschmidt has said throughout the Cardinals’ practices with the new rules and larger bases that he hasn’t felt much difference moving around first.

There’s more space for the runner to reach the base, so the tag changes.

The reigning National League MVP said he was prepared for the pitch clock and eight-second timer on hitters to be a bigger deal than it was for his two at-bats Saturday. But, he pointed out, he hasn’t had to deal with it in a big moment.

“That’s when I think it’s going to show up,” Goldschmidt said. “Maybe there’s a borderline call you don’t like or you take an awkward swing, big situation, long at-bat, foul off a slider or something and you just want to take a moment. That’s when the clock is going to show up. We’ll have to figure out how to deal with that.

“I do think when you get in bigger moments it’s going to come out more,” he added. “You know, 3-2, two outs, bases loaded, ninth inning, or eighth, or seventh. We’re in spring training and it’s not that big of a deal (in) the game as far as the result. It’s not some pressure-packed situation. I could see that being it.”

It was for Atlanta.

In Atlanta’s game Saturday against the Red Sox, the ninth inning reached the tipping point Goldschmidt described. Prospect Cal Conley was at the plate with the bases loaded, two outs, and a 3-2 count. Umpire John Libka called him for a violation, awarded the Red Sox a strike, and the game ended, tied 6-6.

The hyperattention on the new rules and dissection of how they will shape the game has dominated so much conversation in camp that Marmol wanted to shift the talk, at least internally. Marmol and his staff met with minor-league coaches in the second floor conference room to go over tricks and trends they saw during the experiments of these rules at the lower levels. Marmol held a similar discussion in the clubhouse with players from the minors who had in-game experiences major-leaguers had not.

But he sought Saturday to point out that too much focus on the new rules could mean not enough rules on old truths — the hardest part of the game is still in the game.

Fixating on a pitch clock can create a fog.

“Kind of forget to pitch and execute a pitch?” Marmol said. “That’s the whole point of this. You win ballgames by doing all the other things, so we wanted to make sure early in camp that guys were focused on the things that matter to winning ballgames. We’ll get used to all these rules. We’ve got time. They aren’t very difficult rules: Speed up.”

And then there are moments within that 15-second clock where the new rules and traditional preparation merge.

Wainwright opted not to call his own game from a PitchCom device on his glove so that his first outing of spring could focus on the pitch clock and comfort with it. It’s been on his mind to use the new rule to adjust something that has been around so long a teammate has a phrase for it.

“Jack (Flaherty) calls it my ‘spring training pace’ — it’s always a little quicker than my season pace,” Wainwright said. “I think I would like to pitch at that spring training pace all the time. I have more effectiveness when I work quick. I execute better. I would like to work a little quicker all the time. It’s good practice.”