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Why Offense Has Increased: Part 1--The Lowered Pitching Mound

© Harold Friend

INTRODUCTION

In baseball, fifty years is an eternity. Baseball today is quite different from the game that existed fifty years ago but because baseball's basic structure, with the exception of the designated hitter rule, has seemingly remained the same and the changes have occurred over many decades, it requires a conscious effort to carefully analyze baseball's evolution. It is easy to lose perspective when one is immersed in baseball games seven months a year. The height of the pitching mound has been changed, the designated hitter rule has been instituted in almost every professional league but the National, the strike zone has been shrinking, the ball has become livelier, and more teams have been created. Other than that, little has changed.

THE HEIGHT OF THE PITCHING MOUND

On December 3, 1968, the Baseball Rules Committee voted to lower the height of the pitching mound from fifteen to ten inches and to require that all pitching mounds be sloped gradually so that pitchers will not appear to be firing from a steep cliff to the batter below. The pitcher has more leverage on a higher mound while the greater angle produced from the higher mound makes it more difficult to hit the ball squarely. According to physicists, the gear effect states that when comparing a smaller arc and a wider arc, the wider arc generates more velocity from the same force, which means that throwing off a higher mound results in greater velocity.

Today's baseball players are bigger and stronger than any in the history of the game. Nutrition, training methods, and medical advances have resulted in people being bigger and stronger than individuals of fifty years ago.

Scott Kazmir is considered the top left handed pitching prospect in baseball but some scouts fear that his small physical size may prevent him from developing the stamina necessary to be a starting pitcher. If I know very little about Scott Kazmir, my first question is, "What is Scott Kazmir's physical size?" I look up Scott Kazmir and discover that he is 20 years old, 6' tall and weighs 170 pounds. In 2004 such an individual has "small physical size." In 1950 such as individual was considered tall.

Warren Spahn was 6' tall and weighed 175 pounds. He started 665 games and completed 382 of them. I never realized the importance of an extra five pounds. Whitey Ford, who had a reputation of not pitching complete games, was 5'10" and weighed 181 pounds. Ford started 438 games and completed 156 of them. Bobby Shantz won 24 and lost 7 for the fourth place 1952 Philadelphia Athletics and won the American League Most Valuable Player Award (there was no Cy Young Award until 1956). Shantz was 5'6" tall and weighed 142 pounds (that is not a typing error). Spahn, Ford, and Shantz, like Kazmir, are left handed, but the best example of all is Bob Feller who, like Kazmir, is 6' tall but Feller weighed 185 pounds.