USA TODAY International Edition
Thorough studies must precede change
This is an extremely mild take, so I will present it the hottest way possible:
Hell yeah, Major League Baseball should explore moving back the pitcher’s mound!
Are you serious? MLB saw revenue blow past $10 billion in 2018, and there is no better way I know of to invest some of that windfall than putting together exploratory committees to examine all sorts of changes to the game, mild and wild.
Strikeouts have been on the rise in the sport for more than a decade now because pitchers throw harder than ever before and teams deploy their pitchers in smarter ways, and now all of a sudden every single bullpen has five dudes who throw 98 with Nintendo sliders.
To counter the trend, Jayson Stark reports at The Athletic, MLB has proposed putting together a joint committee with the union to study the effects of moving the pitcher’s rubber back from the 60-foot 6-inch standard set in 1893.
If they put me in charge of the league and some portion of the phenomenal baseball fortune that suddenly no one is eager to share with great players, I would commission the heck out of that study.
What happens if the rubber is, say, 61 feet away? Does that small difference compensate for the massive leaguewide increase in velocity that has come with better training methods and improvements in the understanding of mechanics? Will there be more balls in play? More dingers? It’d be cool to find out.
I’m not saying they should do it, of course. That’s way too rash! It’s the type of decision you want to make only after the tireless work of an exploratory committee establishes a firm hypothesis predicting its effects.
The proposed group, Stark reports, would comprise two representatives from the league and two from the union, and it is my strong and considered opinion that four people are not nearly enough to uncover all of the data necessary to better understand this. Would such a change have different effects on different pitches? What if it made curveballs more effective and sliders less so? What if it made cutters unhittable?
I want our nation’s top physicists all weighing in on this, and I want them working in concert with the world’s best kinesiologists to determine if the new distance would change the way pitchers throw and jeopardize their health. I want data on the average MLB hitter’s vision and reaction time so we can know if it’d make any difference on how often they swing and miss.
There should be whole courses at M.I.T. and CalTech called, “What If We Mess With Baseball,” maybe as an interdisciplinary pursuit covering physics and economics. There should be whole majors in messing with baseball, even. Grad-school coursework, too, and grants for independent studies. Our nation’s best and brightest need to be engaged in the noble pursuit of determining what would happen if they change fundamental aspects of baseball.
What happens if the mound is at 70 feet? What happens if there’s no mound at all, and now the second baseman has to pitch? What if you’re only allowed to have two outfielders? What if they add an extra seam to the baseball, in various locations? What if someone upgrades Google Glass and lets hitters wear it to recognize spin? What if all managers are replaced by artificial intelligence?
I’d like to know this stuff, and it’s important that Major League Baseball explore it.