Lowering the Pitching Mound: Saving Baseball

[00:00:00] On December 3rd, 1968, after one of the most dominating years of pitching in Major League Baseball history, which became known as the Year of the Pitcher, Major League Baseball voted to lower the pitcher mound to increase offense to get fans back excited for the game after one of the worst offensive seasons in history.

[00:00:21] Today we're going to dive into what happened to make this change and how it's affected the league ever since. And it's something the league continues to try to do is increase offense and have fan experience be number one. Today on Daily Sports History.

[00:00:44] Welcome to Daily Sports History. I'm Ethan Reese, your guide as you daily learn more about sports history, increasing your sports knowledge as today we talk about lowering of the pitching mound.

[00:00:55] And today's trivia question to listen out for is what other rule was changed to help increase offense after the 1968 season?

[00:01:05] In all of sports, there's always the adage that defense wins championships, but offense sells tickets.

[00:01:12] And you see that over the years that each league, whenever they make changes to the league, it's always gears to help the offense rather than defense.

[00:01:21] Because the more scoring, no matter what the sport, the more people like it.

[00:01:26] Not many of us like a shutout of any sport. We want someone to score. We want a win to happen somehow.

[00:01:32] So we need, we have a need and a want to see scoring.

[00:01:36] And baseball had an issue back in 1968, which is now known as the Year of the Pitcher.

[00:01:42] As up until that point, in the modern era, it was very rare for a pitcher to have an ERA for a season under 2.0.

[00:01:50] And this season had seven different pitchers have an ERA under 2.0.

[00:01:55] With the lowest being Bob Gibson, who had an ERA of 1.12.

[00:02:00] That was the lowest ERA ever done in Major League history and was only matched by Satchel Paige in the Negro Leagues in 1944.

[00:02:09] All the other pitchers below 1.2 all happened before 1920.

[00:02:14] Bob Gibson was a great pitcher, without a doubt.

[00:02:17] But this was an outlier for a season.

[00:02:20] And since 1969, when they changed the rules, the lowest ERA for a season was by Dwight Gooden for the New York.

[00:02:28] This year, two pitchers won the Cy Young and the MVP in their league.

[00:02:34] Bob Gibson won the National League.

[00:02:36] And Denny McClain won the American League MVP and Cy Young.

[00:02:42] And he had an ERA of 1.96, winning 31 games.

[00:02:47] It wasn't only that. The batting average for the league went down to 230, which was the lowest since the dead ball era.

[00:02:57] That's pre-1920.

[00:02:59] And the runs per game was down to 3.24.

[00:03:03] Again, the lowest since 1908.

[00:03:06] And even players that hit for power struggled as only one player that season hit more than 37 home runs.

[00:03:13] And that was Willie McCovey.

[00:03:14] So after the season, the MLB got together and they wanted to change some things around.

[00:03:18] And they looked at two possible things to change to increase offense throughout the league.

[00:03:23] And what they did was they lowered the pitcher's mound, which is often known as the Bob Gibson change.

[00:03:29] This happened because of Bob Gibson, everyone says.

[00:03:32] But it's not just Bob Gibson.

[00:03:34] It was everyone else.

[00:03:36] Bob Gibson was great, had a historic season.

[00:03:38] But there were multiple pitchers that had historic seasons that year.

[00:03:41] And what they did was they reduced the height of the pitching mound.

[00:03:46] Now, if you don't know, the pitching mound is what is a little bit of a mound of dirt that the pitcher stands on that lifts him up off the earth a little bit.

[00:03:53] It helps because when you throw a ball, naturally it has a gravitational pull down.

[00:03:58] So the higher you are up, the easier it is to pitch.

[00:04:02] And at the time, it was at 15 inches.

[00:04:04] And they lowered it down to 10 inches.

[00:04:07] Now, only five inches, but this does change a lot.

[00:04:10] It changes the trajectory of the ball so it makes it a little easier to hit.

[00:04:13] It's a flatter ball coming in.

[00:04:15] And it also lessens the velocity a pitcher can have as they are not coming downhill as much.

[00:04:20] Now, this also has an adverse effect as it increases the effort on the pitchers trying to get more velocity and increases the risk of them.

[00:04:28] And since this time, we had seen a lot more injuries to the shoulder and elbows of pitchers after this.

[00:04:36] But it's not a huge gap that it would be completely noticeable.

[00:04:39] And it actually had an immediate effect.

[00:04:43] The league-wide ERA in 1968 was 2.98.

[00:04:47] It's a very low number.

[00:04:49] The following year in 1969, after they did this pitching change, it went up to 3.61, which definitely did have an effect.

[00:04:56] But this wasn't the only thing that they changed.

[00:04:58] They also changed the strike zone.

[00:05:00] Previously, the strike zone was from the top of the shoulders to the knees.

[00:05:04] And what they did is they lowered it to be about where the armpit is down to the knees.

[00:05:09] This change lowered the strike zone meant there was more chance of walks and allowed pitchers have to be more focused in where they're throwing the ball, allowing easier balls to be hit by the hitters.

[00:05:20] This also helped make that change.

[00:05:23] But we often forget about the strike zone change and focus on the pitching mound change because this was a physical change to the mound.

[00:05:30] Physical changes to the sport aren't very common.

[00:05:33] Most of the physical changes to the field have not happened since the 1800s.

[00:05:39] They changed the pitching distance in 1893 to 60 feet, 6 inches away from home plate, which it still is at today.

[00:05:47] The base path they changed to be officially 90 feet in 1877.

[00:05:52] Home plate was given its five-sided pentagon shape in 1900, and that hasn't changed since then.

[00:05:59] And even though this was the low point for the batting average, it wasn't like it just happened.

[00:06:05] It had been dropping steadily every year for over eight years.

[00:06:08] It had dropped every single year.

[00:06:10] And since then, the batting average had not been accumulative in the MLB below 256 until 2018.

[00:06:19] And between 2018 and this following year, all but one time to be below that.

[00:06:24] So that's why you've seen these changes they've made to the pitching clock to...

[00:06:29] But these are rules that the MLB has put in place to make the game better.

[00:06:33] And these are two rules that definitely changed.

[00:06:36] The strike zone and the mound size has changed everything for the game.

[00:06:40] And it helped the game more than anything else up to that point.

[00:06:44] It made runs go up.

[00:06:45] It made batting average go up.

[00:06:47] It made the game more fun.

[00:06:48] And it really saw its heyday after this point, as baseball players were the highest paid athletes in the world at the time.

[00:06:54] And it really helped grow the sport even more.

[00:06:57] And such a small change of five inches changed the sport forever.

[00:07:03] And if you want more baseball history, I encourage you to check out a great new podcast I found called My Baseball History.

[00:07:16] My Baseball History is a long form interview podcast with and about the people who make baseball what it is.

[00:07:22] Whether it's a former player, coach, bat boy, historian, artist, or collector.

[00:07:27] On each episode, I'll talk to someone new who has some sort of association to the game.

[00:07:32] I'm your host, Dan Wallach.

[00:07:33] And you can follow along with me and my guest every episode through the pictures and links in the liner notes at shoelesspodcast.com.

[00:07:39] Or listen to My Baseball History wherever you're listening right now.

[00:07:42] I'll put a link in the description below for you to check out My Baseball History.

[00:07:47] And I want to thank you for listening to today's episode.

[00:07:50] If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend.

[00:07:54] Say, hey, check out this sports history podcast so we can learn more about sports history together.

[00:07:58] And go to the bar and win our trivia night every single night.

[00:08:02] And come back tomorrow for more daily sports history.

[00:08:06] And did you catch the answer to today's trivia question?

[00:08:09] What other rule was changed after the 1968 season?

[00:08:13] And that rule was the strike zone changing from the top of the shoulders to the armpits, making it smaller, allowing for more offense.