In his answer to What’s the purpose of the pitcher’s mound in baseball? Cecil says the mound was lowered from fifteen inches to ten inches in 1963. He got the year wrong - this happened in 1969. Hitting had been declining for several years, and by 1968 the batting average for the entire American League was only .230, and the AL’s highest average was only .301 (by Carl Yastrzemski). Here is a citation - look at the year 1969.
Hm, checked various sources, and you’re right. I’ll fix. Thanks.
I have a hard time believing that dropping the starting point by 5" over a pitching distance of 60’ 6" would make any practical difference to what angle the ball arrives at the batter.
Did batting averages rise in the 70s? If they did I would suspect another rule change that year was more of an effect:
… depending on how much of a reduction that was of course.
I don’t think it’s the angle that gives the pitcher an advantage when throwing off a mound. The fact that he’s falling a little bit allows him to throw harder. Dropping the mound by a third (5 inches out of 15) reduces this advantage significantly.
Well, you’re disagreeing with Unca Cec:
According to baseball-almanac.com that rule changed in the same year. How was the strike zone defined before the change?
Prior to 1969 the strike zone was the space over home plate from the top of the batter’s shoulders to the knees. In 1969 the top of the strike zone was lowered to the batter’s armpits, and the bottom of the zone war raised to the tops of the knees. It wasn’t a huge change, but it was significant because pitchers try to throw to the corners of the strike zone. For example, a high inside fastball couldn’t be quite as high any more and a low outside breaking pitch couldn’t be quite as low. This cut into the effectiveness of one of the most common pitching patterns.
And yes, I’m disagreeing with Cecil on the main advantage to the pitcher in throwing off a mound.
Perhaps you can expand on this then. How does falling a little bit give a measurable advantage to the pitcher, and how does reducing that little bit by 1/3 significantly reduce that advantage?
Pitching “down” the mound adds a little momentum to the pitchers body, increasing the speed of the pitch a little bit.
Well obviously, but enough to make a measurable difference to batting averages? Jeff Lichtman’s claim was Dropping the mound by a third (5 inches out of 15) reduces this advantage significantly, which I just don’t see.
You can find the batting stats for both major leagues on baseball-reference.com. Here they are for:
In the AL, batting averages went from .230 to .246 (an increase of about 7%), on-base averages went from .297 to .321 (an increase of about 8%), and slugging averages went from .339 to .369 (an increase of about 9%). Runs scored per game went from 3.41 to 4.09 (a whopping increase of about 20%).
In the NL, batting averages went from .243 to .250 (an increase of about 3%), on-base averages went from .300 to .319 (an increase of about 6%), and slugging averages went from .341 to .369 (an increase of about 8%). Runs scored per game went from 3.43 to 4.05 (a whopping increase of about 18%).
So offense increased in 1969, the year the rules were changed. I don’t know how to tell how much of the change was due to each rule change.
As for why lowering the mound reduces the advantage to the pitcher - it’s a matter of pitching mechanics. Pitchers generate speed not just with their arms but with their whole bodies: arms, torso and legs. Part of the speed comes from the fact that the pitcher’s body drops as he strides forward. This is true even when throwing without a mound. The mound lets the pitcher throw harder by allowing his body to drop more than it could on flat ground. The higher the mound, the more the body drops and the harder the pitcher can throw.
I don’t have any numbers for how much speed was lost when the mound was lowered. Radar guns weren’t in common use in baseball in 1968/1969, so I don’t think anyone measured the difference. You should know, though, that a difference of only a couple of percent on a major league fastball can make a big difference. At this level of play the pitchers throw hard enough that a batter’s timing has to be near-perfect. A couple of miles per hour difference in a pitch can be the difference between a line drive and a foul ball (or a swinging strike). It’s not that dropping the height of the mound by a third drops pitch speeds by a third - it’s that a small drop in speed can have a big effect.
You mean you will fix…for Cecil, right?
Wouldn’t having a higher mound allow a pitcher to “fall” an additional distance and impart that force to the ball? In the ideal case you would add the force associated with a pitcher’s 200 lbs or so falling 5". Since a baseball weighs so much less than the pitcher, a great deal of additional speed is added to the ball.
It reduced the advantage of a raised mound, as Jeff’s statistics bear out.