So baseball will reconnoiter its physical arrangement of pitcher-to-hitter. Big news. An experiment to be conducted in an independent minor league will extend the traditional 60-foot, six-inch separation of the game’s primary antagonists by one foot. This, under the scrutiny of the Majors’ mad scientists, apparently desperate for more action, more balls in play.
Will moving the pitcher’s mound back one foot curb the recent proliferation of strikeouts? Will it juice up a sport futzing around with various schemes to speed its pace and rope in a generation of younger fans drawn to the non-stop chaos of football and basketball?
Or will it be messing with a sacred balance, tilting a competitive edge away from pitchers and mollycoddling batsmen? (At a time, ironically, when there also are complaints of too many home runs.) Also: Might the change produce more runs and further lengthen already endless games?
Two fairly outrageous thoughts came to mind upon reading the move-the-mound plan:
The first was having come across an article, years ago, by someone named Eisenstein, who suggested that the home run is a dull play and that balls hit over outfield fences should be outs. It seemed sacrilegious enough that I should immediately poll some players about the idea.
One of them was Atlanta Braves outfielder Dale Murphy who, at the time, was walloping homers at a Ruthian pace. Murphy politely dismissed the home-runs-are-outs proposal as silly. On the other hand, the Braves’ dominant relief pitcher, Bruce Sutter, who that night had served up a grand slam to New York Mets catcher Gary Carter, suggested that “when they hit it out, it should be a double play.”
Then, as now, one man’s RBI is another man’s hanging curve.
The other reflection regarding this mound-relocation trial balloon had to do with my long-ago attendance at a 19th-Century re-enactment of a game of Base Ball (it was two words then) at one of those “living museum” restoration villages. On display was a reminder that there is nothing new about the sport’s moving targets on rules and specifications.
In 1859, shortly before the first professional league was formed, there was no sliding into bases permitted. No stealing. No bunting. No arguing with the umpire (in his top hat, white shirt, black vest and bowtie). No cursing (25-cent fine; roughly $800 in 2021 money). No popcorn and Cracker Jack.
The pitcher—then called the “bowler”—threw underhand and the batter—“striker”—was permitted to call for his preferred location of the pitch. Fly balls fielded on one bounce were outs.
Things change. It hasn’t been that long ago that basketball poobahs considered raising the basket to counter the increasing size of players. But soon settled instead on the three-point shot to open the court. It’s not exactly ancient history that the NFL literally moved the goalposts—from the front to the rear of the end zone—to offset the escalating length and accuracy of kickers. Then moved the scrimmage line back for extra-point attempts.
Long, long ago, pitchers were a mere 50 feet from home plate. Foul balls didn’t count as strikes. Batters were allowed four strikes and weren’t awarded a walk until the ninth ball. As recently as 1969, the strike zone was shrunk—from top-of-the-shoulder, bottom-of-the-knee to armpit and top-of-the-knee—and the pitcher’s mound was lowered by five inches.
All manner of inconsistencies forever persist in baseball—odd-shaped playing fields that turn long outs into homers; the thin air of parks at altitude that add distance to fly balls; “the wind blowing out” in Chicago’s Wrigley Field. With the pitcher’s mound an additional foot distant from home plate, will that tamper with the physics of when curveballs break on their way to the batter? Will it physically wear down pitchers attempting to get their fastballs through that extra foot before the batter can react?
In 2008, there was a rumpus over Japanese pitchers claiming to throw a revolutionary “gyroball,” which was said to change directions horizontally and therefore bring an entirely new challenge to hitters. But David Coburn, head of the research department at Popular Mechanics, whose editors had released a book explaining why a curveball curves, wrote that the gyroball was “The Bigfoot of baseball, an urban legend born in a Japanese lab and racing across the Internet…either the first new pitch in nearly four decades or a complete and total sham.”
The pitch hasn’t been heard of since.
Will the 61-foot, six-inch pitcher-to-hitter dynamic ruin careers? Save baseball? Mean anything at all? Will some sub-committee on analytics—part of a committee on velocity, rotation, launch angle and tobacco-chewing—be able to recommend parameters that are beyond reproach by any athlete, fan, manager, GM and owner?
Robert Adair, the Yale professor who authored “Physics and Baseball,” once gave me this definitive answer to these related matters: “Seeing as how I’m one of them, I would say that if you want something really stupid, get an intellectual to tell you about it.”
Because, what it all will boil down to is players—pitchers and hitters, within the prescribed rules—just doing what they do best.