Little change from moving mound back
Atlantic League shifted pitching spot back a foot to get more balls in play
In early August, the eight teams in the Atlantic League embarked on one of the more scrutinized and polarizing experiments in the history of baseball.
Their groundskeepers dug up the game’s sacred starting point, the pitching rubber, and moved it back 12 inches — 61 feet 6 inches from home plate. Professional pitchers have toed a rubber 60 feet 6 inches from home before delivering the ball to the batter for more than a century. But in eight stadiums in the Mid-Atlantic, the long-standing baseball math suddenly changed, part of a Major League Baseball experiment meant to increase balls put in play.
What has followed in the weeks since the seemingly seismic shift has been a widespread feeling that the impact on gameplay has been minimal, though its impact on a player’s health and future could still prove negative, according to interviews with nearly a dozen Atlantic League players, coaches and executives.
“There was a lot of talk about it at first. Pitchers were concerned,” Southern Maryland Blue Crabs manager Stan Cliburn said. “But in all sincerity, it has not come into play.”
Atlantic League President Rick White said weeks of frantic phone calls from panicked players and coaches stopped the day after the rubber moved back a foot.
But White and his coaches have plenty of incentive to remain publicly optimistic.
The Atlantic League is independent and composed of teams unaffiliated with MLB franchises, but it is a partner with MLB and has long been known for innovation, perhaps most notably with its use of “robo umps.” That partnership is important to the league’s leadership and owners, according to players and coaches, who almost all admitted they would likely face internal blowback if they offered too much criticism with their names attached.
But many acknowledged that it is likely still too soon to draw any trustworthy conclusions about how the move will affect the game and those who play
it. A few weeks of data isn’t much of a statistical sample, and statistically speaking, the changes to runs per game, hits per game and strikeouts have been minimal.
As of Thursday, in 67 games played from 61 feet 6 inches, teams are combining for 6.37 runs per game, according to data tracked by MLB. Before the switch, they combined for 6.33.
The strikeout rates MLB is hoping to suppress have increased somewhat in that tiny sample, from 18.3 percent to 18.8 percent. The walk rate has decreased from 12.4 percent to 11.3 percent.
But pitchers from multiple teams said that while they don’t always notice the extra foot from pitch to pitch, they all noticed a similar unintended byproduct: Almost all of them experienced soreness in their lat muscles — the area down the rib cage and into the back of their throwing arm side — after their first few outings from the new distance.
Blue Crabs reliever Mat Latos, who spent nine years in the majors including a stint with the Washington Nationals, said he is used to elbow pain and knee issues from lingering injuries.
But he had never had soreness like he did after his first outing from the new distance.
Latos believes the stress on that muscle resulted from moving his release point further from his body to ensure his pitches cross the plate in the same way they did when he was throwing from a shorter distance. His veteran teammate-pitching coach, Daryl Thompson, experienced the same thing, though both said that lat soreness was not enough to prevent them from making their next scheduled appearance.
When Major League Baseball announced its experiment with the pitching rubber, league officials argued quirks like that meant the change would hardly constitute a paradigm shift.
They argued that catchers often set up a foot behind home plate as it is, so some pitchers have been throwing an extra foot all along.
They noted hitters often erase the back line of the batter’s box to move as far away from the mound as possible, something Cliburn and York Revolution manager Mark Mason noted, too.
When it first considered moving Atlantic League mounds back, MLB floated the idea of a two-foot change. By the time they introduced it, that bump was just a foot — though Mason pointed out that the robotic umpires the league is also testing are set to measure where the ball passes at a point seven inches behind the front of home plate. In other words, Atlantic League pitchers were already pitching to a spot 61 feet or so from home plate earlier in the season.