Today, the pitcher is probably the most important position on a baseball field.
However, this wasn't always the case.
In the early days of the game, the pitcher's role was merely to toss the ball to players
to initiate play, since the real action didn't start until the bat hit the ball.
Pitchers often lobbed the ball underhand; there were no fastballs or curveballs (at
least other than the natural curve from the underhand pitch), and no balls or strikes
were called.
Since baseball revolved around batters hitting the ball, a pitcher would pitch as many pitches
as needed until a hit was executed.
In the mid-19th century, the front of the pitching area was 45 feet from home base.
As long as the pitcher didn't cross over this line, he was fine.
However, as more serious competition took root, pitchers began to look for ways to gain
an advantage over hitters by inducing weaker contact.
Since there were no official rules about what constituted a 'fair pitch,' pitchers started
testing the boundaries...a lot, despite that many at the time considered this sort of thing
cheating.
For instance, to gain more speed on their pitches, pitchers took a running start before
pitching the ball underhand to the batter.
The hope was that a faster pitch would prevent a batter from squaring up the ball.
As pitchers continued to experiment with pitches, their varied attempts often resulted in wild
pitches to try and lure hitters to swing at balls outside their reach.
However, since batters didn't have to swing if they didn't want to (balls and strikes
weren't yet being called yet), they could wait all day for a decent pitch.
Selective batters caused pitchers to throw 200-300 pitches per game, which made for a
really long, slow game (and presumably some sore arms).
This back and forth game between pitchers and hitters finally resulted in the National
Association setting parameters for what would eventually be balls and strikes.
Also towards this end, by 1864, the pitching box was instituted to limit the freedom of
pitchers.
The 3 x 12 foot box prevented pitchers from taking a running start prior to releasing
the ball.
Just to be sure, though, they were also required to pitch with both feet on the ground.
With reduced speed and leverage- baseball once again became a hitter's game.
But all was not lost for pitchers.
They soon found that it wasn't just peak velocity that counted, figuring out ways to put movement
on the ball and change speeds to mess up the hitter's timing.
Their reward for such innovation was an increased pitching distance to compensate for the increase
skill of the pitcher, with the front of the pitching box moved to 50 feet from the batter
instead of 45.
In 1884, pitchers were allowed to throw overhand if they desired, which resulted in even faster
pitches that batters had a difficult time handling.
In 1893, in the attempt to, once again, create an equilibrium between pitchers and hitters
to maximize fan enjoyment, new rules were put in place.
The pitching distance increased to 60 feet, 6 inches; a pitching slab replaced the pitching
box; and the pitching mound was introduced.
Between 1893 and 1950, the only rule regarding the height of the pitching mound was that
the top could be no more than fifteen inches above the playing field.
Teams used this loose rule to their advantage, often making significant adjustments to the
height of the mound to play to the home team's pitching strengths or to throw off pitchers
from visiting teams.
Either way, the variable height and mound construction provided a home field advantage.
In response to this, in 1950, Major League Baseball mandated that each pitching mound
had to be exactly fifteen inches high.
By delivering the ball from a fifteen inch elevation, pitchers gained momentum as they
lunged downward off the pitching rubber and the ball gained even more speed, which made
it more difficult for batters to square up, especially with the downward angle of the
ball.
Combined with a 1963 rule change that expanded the strike zone, pitchers began to dominate
hitters once again to an extreme degree.
In fact, 1968 is referred to as "The Year of the Pitcher," because average run scoring
per game per team that year was a scant 3.42, with a full 21% of the games ending in one
of the teams getting shut out.
For reference, during the steroid era in 2000 as high as 5.14 runs per game per team was
seen with just 8% of games resulting in one team getting shutout.
In 2015, there were 4.25 runs per game and a shutout rate of 14%.
In 2019, the pace is currently about 4.84 runs per game.
(The sweet spot to maximize fan enjoyment, and where MLB has mostly tried to stay within
when adjusting things to favor the hitter or pitcher, is between 4 to 5 runs per game.
Although there are some who argue even higher is better, almost no one argues that below
4 runs per team, per game makes the game more enjoyable to watch.
Might as well just start allowing ties and call it soccer at that point.)
And now for a brief aside, because we know some commenters are already scrolling down
to rage about our use of the term “soccer”, if you’re wondering why American Football
is called that and Association Football is called “Soccer” in America, Soccer was
once a popular name for Football in Britain in the sport’s earliest days.
When the rules for the sport were first being defined, it was, of course, named “Association
Football” to distinguish it from the other forms of football commonly played.
Within a year of its inception, this got slurred down to “Assoccer,” after the common practice
of adding “-er” to nicknames at the time in Britain.
Very shortly after this, “Assoccer” became “Soccer,” which remained a popular nickname
for the sport in Britain until about a half century ago, along with just “Football.”
The game initially spread throughout the world primarily known as “Football.”
However, in countries where other forms of football already were dominate, the nickname
“Soccer” was, and in some cases still is, the preferred name to avoid confusion.
And because the name “soccer” still works to avoid any confusion when dealing with audience
members who might be from the U.S. or might be from Germany, we still go with the term
“soccer”, much to the chagrin of some.
In any event, going back to pitcher’s mounds, in response to the Year of the Pitcher, the
following year efforts were made to swing things back in the hitter's favor a bit, with
the rules adjusted to lower the pitcher's mound from 15 inches to 10 and to restore
the smaller, pre-1963 strike zone.
It worked; in 1969 the average run scoring per game jumped to 4.07 and then 4.34 in 1970.
While the height of the pitcher's mound has not changed since (to date), the never ending
war to try to keep a consistent, competitive balance between pitchers and hitters is still
being waged and has become a concern in the last decade as pitchers have started to dominate
the sport once again, with run scoring down as low as 4.07 runs per game, per team as
recently as 2014.
Of course, to solve that issue, beyond many players jumping on the flyball bandwagon in
recent years, it would appear MLB has gotten Rawlings to change various facets of the ball
to help it leave the yard a bit more frequently, though they continually deny anything was
intentional or any real change was done despite pretty conclusive evidence supporting that
notion, then an abrupt backtracking on that for a little bit, and now back.
The most baseball commissioner Rob Manfred has been willing to admit to is that, to quote
him in a recent interview, “They [Rawlings] haven't changed their process
in any meaningful way.
They haven't changed their materials.
There's two points that I would make, even in the report last year: The scientists identified
the pill in the baseball — not what it was actually composed of — but the centering
of the pill in the baseball as something that could be a drag issue.
To the extent that the pill is not perfectly centered, the ball wobbles when it's hit,
creates more drag.
We think one of the things that may be happening is they're getting better at centering the
pill.
It creates less drag.”
Bonus Facts: • When Henry Chadwick developed the E.R.A.
(earned run average) statistic, his goal was not to evaluate a pitcher's worth, but rather
to differentiate between runs caused by batting skill and those caused by lack of fielding
skill; the pitcher’s skill was not factored in.
This makes sense considering pitchers of the day tended to just throw the ball right down
the middle of the plate, as previously noted.
Incidentally, Chadwick chose the “K” to denote a strikeout when developing the baseball
box score because it was the last letter in "struck" as in "struck out."
His reasoning?
He noted, "the letter K in struck is easier to remember in connection with the word, than
S." Chadwick was also the first to setup a demonstration
proving that the rotation of a baseball could cause the ball to curve in flight.
Before this, some pitchers had already observed and used this to their advantage, but no one
had yet proved that it was an actual effect and not just in the pitchers' heads.
To prove it, he set up two stakes placed twenty feet apart in a line between the pitcher and
batter’s box.
A pitcher, Fred Goldsmith, then threw a ball which ended up being to the right of the first
stake, but then curved to end up to the left of the second stake.
• Chadwick was an outspoken supporter of changing baseball to allow extra innings instead
of letting games end in a tie as was the rule at the time.
He also argued successfully that the game should be changed so that a hitter was not
out unless an opposing player caught the ball in the air.
Before this was made a rule, the batter was still out if the opposing player managed to
catch the ball on the first bounce.
Due to the fact that baseball gloves were virtually non-existent / ineffective in this
era, you can see why many players preferred catching the ball on the first bounce.