BUFFALO, N.Y. – Minor league baseball’s new speed-up rules hit a glitch on opening day.

The center field clock in Buffalo stopped working after the second inning of the Triple-A Bisons’ opener against the Rochester Red Wings on Thursday. The game was the first on the regular-season minor league schedule, and first to debut pace-of-play rules introduced this offseason.

Pitchers have 2 minutes and 25 seconds to begin their windup or come to set between innings. And they have 20 seconds to do so between pitches.

Each pitch is supposed to be timed by three clocks in the stadium – two behind home plate and one beyond center field.

The clocks worked through two innings before the center field clock went out to start the third. It came back on at the start of the fourth inning. All three clocks then went out at the top of the sixth, before coming back on for the bottom half of the inning.

Bisons officials had no immediate comment on the problems.

The new rules take into account clock malfunctions. When malfunctions happen, umpires are supposed to keep time on a stopwatch while the stadium clocks are turned off.

Otherwise, both starting pitchers wasted no time in delivering their first pitches under a light drizzle.

Bisons starter Andrew Albers got his first pitch off with about 13 seconds left on the pitch clock to open the game. And Red Wings starter Alex Meyer was even quicker, getting his first pitch off with 27 seconds left on the clock.

The first inning lasted an efficient 15 minutes, and the first three innings took exactly 45 minutes.

Baseball announced the changes in February after the average time of a nine-inning game stretched to a record 3 hours, 2 minutes last year, up from 2:33 in 1981.

The pace of play rules for Triple-A and Double-A are more radical than those implemented in the majors this season, where pitchers have 30 seconds between pitches.

In the minors, warnings will be issued through the end of April, before balls and strikes will be added to the count as penalties against pitchers and batters. In the majors, players will face possible $500 fines starting May 1.

Three clocks have been installed at each stadium, with one in the outfield and two along the wall behind the plate.

The clock in center began counting down exactly 55 minutes before the 2:05 p.m. start time.

Albers, the Bisons’ starter, had his first taste of speed-up rules playing for Hanwa in the Korean Baseball Organization last year. Though there was no pitching clock, but the break between innings was set at 2½ minutes.

It wasn’t unusual, Albers said, for pitchers to warm up along the side during lengthy half-innings to get a few more throws in.

Bisons general manager Mike Buczkowski favors the new rules as being fan-friendly, noting that International League games have increased by about 20 minutes over the past decade.

“I’m not sure it affects our tickets sales, where it does affect us is if you look around, by the seventh inning the place is half empty,” Buczkowski said. “So where people complain about the pace of game not directly to me, but when they’re leaving in the seventh inning. To me, they’re speaking.”

The objective is to have players adjust to the new rules in the minors so they can be prepared when they make the jump to the majors in the future.

“We try pretty hard to not call it an experiment. Hopefully, what this is going to be a retraining of the way that we operate,” he said. “We’re not trying to speed up the game, we’re trying to be more efficient with our time.”

Bisons’ manager and former major-league catcher Gary Allenson isn’t an immediate fan of the newly instituted rules for various reasons.

Allenson said the game has never been dictated by a clock and expressed concern how the new rules could play a decisive role in determining the outcome of a game.

Allenson, who played six seasons for the Red Sox and one with the Blue Jays through 1985, wondered how his contemporaries might have responded.

“Carlton Fisk always had his back foot in the batter’s box, but it took the front one about five minutes to get back in there,” Allenson said, referring to the Hall of Fame catcher. “He’s got a plaque in Cooperstown, so maybe I did it the wrong way.”