Minor league tinkers with moving mound back a foot
Strikeouts were out of control. Changes in pitching techniques had resulted in batters swinging and missing like never before. To fix the problem, leading minds focused on the center of the diamond. The pitcher would have to move back.
The goal: “the restoration of the proper equilibrium between the two great principles of the game — attack and defense. With the pitcher reduced to the ranks, nine men instead of two will play the game.”
So said Francis Richter, the editor of the weekly Sporting Life, as quoted by author Peter Morris in “A Game Of Inches,” his book on the innovations that shaped baseball. Richter’s column ran in November 1892, but the words apply almost exactly to the modern game.
Major League Baseball believes that the product on the field is in crisis. The league’s declaration Wednesday confirmed it: Starting in the second half of the season, the independent Atlantic League — in partnership with MLB — will move its mounds back by a foot. This is not like putting a runner on second base in extra innings or making the bases a little bigger. This is fundamental.
The distance of 60 feet, 6 inches between the pitching rubber and the plate was established in 1893. The National League — the American League did not exist quite yet — wanted to curb the growing influence of overhand pitching. Strikeouts had risen as high as 4.74 per game in the NL in 1884, but things soon normalized: The rate would not be that high again until 1957.
When one cog in a machine goes haywire, it can lead to disaster. For baseball today, strikeouts are that cog. That’s why MLB is terrified of the impact all those whiffs are having on the entertainment value of the game.
“I love baseball,” Jed Hoyer, the Cubs’ president of baseball operations, said Wednesday. “But the rules aren’t written on stone tablets.”
That’s true, although 60 feet, 6 inches comes close. The last time pitchers worked from a different distance, the union had 44 states and Babe Ruth hadn’t been born. Changing the distance in the majors will be a tough sell to players, and maybe to some owners, too.
“The gut reaction is to say, ‘Well, how’s that going to work?’ ” said Tim Adleman, a former Cincinnati Reds right-hander who pitched in the Atlantic League in 2019. “The mound’s been 60 feet, 6 inches forever, and guys have based everything around the fact that that’s how far you throw down to home plate. I can’t say for sure, but it seems like that extra foot’s going to change quite a bit of stuff.”
For baseball, that is the point. Through Tuesday, batters were striking out at a 24.7% rate this season, an increase of 10 percentage points since 1992. The average time between balls in play this season has risen to almost four minutes. Triples, doubles and stolen bases — action plays that fans say they want, according to the league — are down. That is no way for an industry to attract the younger generation, the paying customers of the future.
Baseball’s timeless, slower pace is part of its appeal, and those who care about the sport have long worried about its longterm viability. Yet here we are, with franchise values soaring, lucrative TV deals everywhere and teams averaging more than 28,000 fans, prepandemic, for 81 home games per season. As popular as the NBA seems to be, it plays about half as many games and averages 10,000 fewer fans for each, in much smaller venues.
So maybe baseball does not need to try so hard to manufacture change. But it is already using its affiliated minors to test other innovations this season — calling balls and strikes with an automated system, regulating pickoff moves and so on — so why not use the unaffiliated minors to study this one?
“It’s going to take a long time to actually get hitters to adjust their swings,” Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer said Wednesday. “I do like the idea that they’re trying to do something. I’m not sure I’d like to be one of the guinea pigs.”