In 1893, the distance from the pitcher’s rubber to home plate in baseball was changed from 50 feet to 60 feet, 6 inches.
This year, 126 years later, in the second half of this year’s Independent Atlantic League season, the league, in cooperation with Major League Baseball, will be testing the effect of moving the pitcher’s plate backward two feet to a distance of 62 feet, 6 inches.
Major League Baseball is using this Independent League to test several possible rules changes this season. According to Michael Pfaff, president of the Long Island Ducks in that league, the change is being made “with the objective of increasing player safety and the frequency of balls in play.”
He went on in a March 9 interview with Newsday to say that “There will be no change to the height or slope of the mound.”

After 126 years of playing the game with the pitcher 60 feet, 6 inches from home plate, baseball has apparently decided that adding an additional two feet that the ball has to travel from the pitcher to the batter will significantly improve a pitcher’s chance of ducking a line back at him or a batter’s ability to avoid a high hard one. Why don’t they just have a machine lob a wiffle ball up underhanded if they’re so concerned about safety?
They eliminated the collisions at home plate with their new rule about blocking the plate and made the pivot at second base into a ballet dance with their rule prohibiting take out slides. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that, in our kinder, gentler society, they want to change a rule adopted in 1893 in order to keep the players of 2019 “safer.”
As for increasing the frequency of balls in play, that 3.3 percent additional feet the ball must travel to get into the hitting zone does not seem to be significant enough to make an appreciable difference in the frequency of contact.
The Independent League will also be testing, for the first half of the year, equipping plate umpires with electronic assistance in calling balls and strikes. The Newsday article quoted above says that the “plate umpire will wear an earpiece and relay the strike or ball count after receiving it from a radar track system known as TrackMan.” The plate umpire will still make all the other calls on his own.
Pfaff goes on to say that having the TrackMan in place “will benefit pitchers on pitches that are often not called because they’re missed by an umpire and (will benefit) pitchers that are able to exploit areas of the strike zone that traditionally haven’t been called but are strikes as defined by the rulebook. (Those pitches) are now going to be called.”
Put those two ideas together. On the one hand, we move the pitcher back so the batters can put more balls in play and on the other hand we adopt the rule that makes sure the pitcher gets the advantage of the correct call on every strike they throw, thus, theoretically reducing the frequency of balls put in play.
How far do you think we are from watching baseball played by robots, umpired by machines pre-programmed so that every game will be a cliffhanger but, there will be no fights among players or bench clearing brawls — and, at the end of the season, every team will have an equal record so the fans will not have to argue or disagree with each other about the home team and no one will get hurt? An additional benefit will be that no team’s players will suffer from a lack of self-esteem for not finishing first. They can all get a participation trophy. Maybe I’ll write a book predicting the future of baseball and call it 2084.
They opened the door in 2008 when they introduced instant replay on whether balls hit out of the park were fair or foul and, like every other part of our world today, it was as Vin Scully would say “Katie bar the door.”
The ideas for improvements to the game just keep coming — like the little guys getting out of the car at the circus. Only, in this case it’s the “Idiot in the Commissioner’s Office” that is the ring master and the victim is our National Pastime.
I must acknowledge that there is one idea being tested in the Independent League that makes sense. That proposal is eliminating radical shifts by requiring that the infielders be on their traditional side of the field when the ball is pitched. This would increase the possibility of balls being safely hit at the same time it would speed up play. It would also reduce the ridiculous number of strikeouts the shifts and the nerds’ reactions to them have caused.
Among the other changes being tested are: increasing the size of bases to 18 square inches; requiring a pitcher to face three batters before he can be removed and eliminating mound visits except to remove a pitcher. While I don’t have the space here to get into the sense or lack of sense of those ideas, I would be remiss if I did not mention the idea for change that I first heard during the telecast of the Red Sox game against the Minnesota Twins on Sunday.
The much less than dynamic duo of Tom Caron and Jarrod Saltalamacchia, perhaps the worst baseball broadcast team ever put together, were floating the idea of having games that end in a tie settled by a home run derby instead of the traditional extra innings. Of course, the “Baseball Gods” had previously tested the idea of starting extra innings with a runner on second base. That was bad enough but suggesting that a contest that a slow pitch softball player would have as much chance winning as a Major League slugger makes you wonder what the two of them were smoking in that radio box.
That’s all for what has become my annual rant about changing a game that was first described as our National Pastime in the New York Mercury in 1853 and continues to be that today. As I say every year at this time, IT AIN’T BROKE, DON’T FIX IT!

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