As such, I'm guessing MLB isn't even close to stepping in and doing something to appease the league's hitters. And heck, it may not do so even if things get progressively worse for hitters in the years to come. If the league can be counted on to do anything, after all, it's to consider business first. The league had to consider the business end of things when pitchers were taking over in ' Per BallparksofBaseball.
Today's fans, however, don't appear to have a problem with the rise of pitching. Baseball experienced an attendance spike last year despite the fact it was a third straight pitching-friendly season, and in general, fans have nothing but love for the dominant arms of the day HarveyDay , anyone?
As long as hitters have a fighting chance and the seats are still being filled, MLB won't have to pursue a measure as drastic as lowering the mound.
It's only going to be a real option once the league's hitting totals fall to much deeper depths while attendance numbers fall with them. It's possible this could happen, but not probable from the looks of things.
And even if offense and attendance do fall to alarming depths, merely considering lowering the mound may be as far as Major League Baseball could go. When the mound was lowered from 15 inches to 10 inches in , pitchers weren't happy about it. William Leggett of Sports Illustrated wrote that the lower mound had pitchers "grumbling often" during spring training, and the Associated Press revealed in that Gibson was still steamed about the change 40 years later.
If the league kicks around the possibility of lowering the mound again, it's going to have plenty of angry pitchers pounding on its door. Owners with high-priced pitchers may not be too happy, either, as the prospect of a lower mound could come hand-in-hand with a prospect of more pitcher injuries. My elbow has been bothering me this spring. I can't pinpoint exactly that it has been caused by the lowering of the mound but this is my 11th spring and I never had problems like this before.
Louis boasting the lowest team ERA, the Cards—thanks to a pop-gun offense—had limped to a disappointing fourth-place finish, with only 87 wins. Although St. Louis got as close as a distant second in mid-August, the Cardinals essentially dogfought the Pittsburgh Pirates for third place most of the season.
Voters clearly were put off by two things: St. But for all intents and purposes, to be utterly ignored while, for example, Maury Wills finished 11th his Los Angeles Dodgers —for whom he had played only games—had, like St. This is in no way an exact number but just a best guess given the data available.
If MLB ever decides to change the height of the pitching mound, I would appreciate it if they can could do it one league at a time so we can see how much it matters. Petersburg Times 2. Sports Illustrated Vault. Could the standardization of mound height also have helped batters more than pitchers , as much as the lowering of it?
With pitcher release points varying by a foot naturally, throwing another half a foot due to mound height may have made it even harder to adjust from game to game. A similar deliterious effect might be noticable for relievers who pitch consecutive games in different venues as … Read more ». Thanks for your comments; you bring up some smart questions.
If the effect of a standardized mound helping the batter was very large, then you would expect to see a larger home road batting split before mount heights were standardized and a smaller split afterwards.
The logic being that for a batter their home mound height is the one that they are used to seeing the most so they would do better against their … Read more ». You mention as a possible cause that MLB expanded in , but then never really expand upon that. Briefly looking at your final two graphs for HR rate and BABIP there is definitely spikes in both from , but there are also definite spikes in both from and I would suggest that the biggest cause for the increased scoring in is that there were two more terrible … Read more ».
Yes, there are more bad pitchers in the league to give up runs, but there are also more bad hitters in the league to strike out. It would probably balance out for the most part. Would it though? By adding replacement level hitters you would expect pitchers especially above average ones to get more Ks. Against replacement level pitchers one would expect above average hitters to hit more homers and have a higher ISO.
Replacement level hitters have to play in the field as well, hurting overall team defense. I would imagine good hitters hitting harder off of replacement level pitchers to more replacement level fielders would skew scoring higher than the good pitchers striking out an extra replacement level hitter per game. On the front end of the strike zone change, I like looking at how if affected Koufax.
Sandy pitched in a progression of home parks from Ebbets Field to the L. Coliseum to Dodger Stadium, from a park that was feet at its deepest and had a RF line, to a park that had a foot LF line and foot power alleys to one that had foot power alleys. He goes from being mediocre to fair in , and then very good when he moves into Dodger Stadium, in , and becomes a monster in , throwing to … Read more ». Fascinating article from top to bottom! I could be wrong, its happened before, but I thought the height of the mound changed from 12 inches to 10 inches between and , NOT 15 inches to Koufax had a circulatory problem in a finger in , causing him to miss the latter part of the season.
As the author suggests, while the strike zone was clearly larger in , I doubt the umpires were actually calling many strikes on shoulder-high pitches.
Although is called the Year of the Pitcher, hitting was gradually decreasing throughout the period after changing the strike zone, culminating in Which, … Read more ». Great article — it captures really well the impact of the shift from , and from I do Pre-Post intervention tests and one of the things we do to control variability over time is compare the average effect of the intervention time period to a pre-intervention period and post-intervention period.
Comparing the average of the metrics you describe above during those time periods will give a more stable estimate of the impact. There is also a great case study for this … Read more ». George is always thinking about baseball, and frequently writes down those thoughts on his blog. Follow him on Twitter GWRambling. You can flag a comment by clicking its flag icon. It introduced a less lively ball this season - at least a ball that travels less distance on long fly balls - and released a memo to pitchers warning that it would be monitoring them to infer who might be doctoring the ball.
It's an attempt to reduce spin rate, and by extension, strikeouts. Strikeouts are up again. For the first time, a quarter of plate appearances are ending in strikeouts.
And home runs continue to fly out of ballparks. The data and training tools to help players to achieve these outcomes had never been better. Thus, pitchers are incentivized to strike out batters, and batters are incentivized to hit home runs. MLB has struggled to make the s' game play like that of the s or even the s. Glasnow is a great example of that as the slider he's added with the help of a high-speed camera and spin-tracking technology has allowed him to reach another level early this season.
Entering play Wednesday, MLB batting average was. The full-season record low is. Batters slashed. In , they slashed. However, baseball hasn't altered the mound distance since it did so several times in the late 19th century, according to research by MLB historian John Thorn. The fledgling circuit, which in those years included franchises in such marginal sites as Troy, Syracuse, Worcester, and Providence, was losing money and in big trouble.
That situation sounds a bit familiar to baseball in , though franchise values and MLB revenues are now in the billions. The mound would be moved back several times, finally to 60 feet, 6 inches, and a pitching rubber was added in Rays pitching coach Kyle Snyder has his pitchers train off of various mound conditions. He said no mound is the same and by the time a reliever enters a game the mound is no longer 10 inches, with the surface having been compressed and altered to some degree, from landing spots to divots dug in front of the rubber.
MLB said it studied biomechanics from a variety of mound distances, up to 63 feet, in a lab setting in and found no changes to those pitchers studied.
But those were college arms not pitching in game conditions. It's like technology and golf and the constant conversations they are having there. The other rule, the "double hook," also targets pitchers: It's designed to keep them in the game.
San Diego starter Blake Snell is probably all for this one.
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