Sunday, July 04, 1999
Is it time for baseball to raise the mound?
Runs and home runs are on record pace
BY SAM MELLINGER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Baseball thrived in 1998, no doubt about it. Home runs were hit at a record pace and the fans loved it. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa started an all-out love affair with fans that the game had been desperate for since the strike and cancellation of the World Series in 1994.
A year later, baseball is having a season of unprecedented offense, and some are worried it's too much of a good thing.
“Fans like offense, but we've got too much of it now,” said Marty Brennaman, Reds radio broadcaster. “We've gone to the extreme.”
The facts:
• This year's games feature more runs and more home runs than at any time in the last 50 years.
• Seventeen players are on pace for 40 or more home runs. Last year, 13 players was a record.
“You've got some guys having career years who probably shouldn't be having them,” said Jay Bell, second baseman for Arizona, who has a career-high 22 homers already this season.
“No matter how you look at it,” said former Reds manager Sparky Anderson, “it's totally unfair to the pitchers.”
Some fear that if last year's home run numbers are challenged, the second time around won't be as exciting.
“What worries me,” said Brennaman, “is there's going to be records set that, as far as I'm concerned, are going to be tainted because they're going to be obtained much easier than the original recordholders.
“They've got to do something.”
One of the most popular ideas is raising the mound, like baseball did in 1969.
Hitters' era began 30 years ago
Baseball's ever-moving pendulum had swung so far toward the pitchers during the 1968 season that the game's powers-that-be decided to do something drastic.
Perhaps it was because the American and National Leagues both sported ERAs under 3.00. Maybe it was because Carl Yastrzemski's .301 average was good enough to lead the AL. Or it could have been because Frank Howard (44) was the only slugger to crack the 40 home run mark.
“That season really pushed the league to help out the hitters,” said Mark Connor, Arizona pitching coach. “And it's been getting harder for pitchers ever since.”
After The Year of The Pitcher, baseball officials shrunk the mound from 15 inches to 10. The effects were immediate. ERAs in both leagues jumped more than a half run, league batting averages went up 16 points, and seven different hitters cracked at least 40 homers.
And that's nothing compared to the 1999 onslaught of offense usually saved for recreational softball games. Each season since 1994 has produced more than two homers per game, a mark reached only twice in the previous quarter century.
“A good team ERA 15 years ago was 3.25,” Connor said. “Now nobody has that, you'll probably lead the league being under four.
“It used to be very rare for a team to score 10 runs. Now, you look up at the scoreboard, and every night it's like that. Every night.”
He's not exaggerating. Since April 27, just one night of baseball games failed to produce a double-digit score: June 7, when six teams scored at least eight, but none reached 10.
The next two nights were business as usual when a combined 15 teams scored double-digits, including Kansas City's 17-13 win over St. Louis in a game that took more than four hours.
Before 1994, only two seasons — 1978 and 87 — had produced two home runs per game. The five seasons since have each produced at least that, and this year's pace of 2.27 would be the highest in the more than 100-year history of baseball.
The causes
Why has offense taken over? Some cite stronger players and smaller ballparks. Others say expansion has diluted the pitching pool. Some say the ball is juiced.
Pitchers, coaches and broadcasters — everybody but the hitters, it seems — swear the ball is wound tighter.
“There's no question about it,” said Don Gullett, Reds pitching coach. “You used to be able to move the leather around a little bit, you can't do that anymore.”
A harder ball creates more bounce off the bat, which means more home runs. But the effect of a harder ball is compounded when you factor in the beefed-up players who are bashing it around.
“Everybody's talking about the ball being juiced, but I don't think so,” said Arizona's left fielder, Luis Gonzalez, who was batting .362 through Thursday, third in the National League. “Guys are just bigger. So many guys coming up out of college are bigger that the older guys feel the need to work out more to stay up here. Speed and power have become the big thing in baseball. If you can hit a ball 450 feet, you can stick around a long time.”
Gonzalez speaks from experience. He debuted in the big leagues in 1990 at a slender 180 pounds. He now weighs more than 200 pounds, a big reason his power numbers have jumped.
He hit a career-high 23 homers last season and, with 13 through Thursday, is on pace better that mark. His .590 slugging percentage this season is 115 points higher than his previous career high.
“The simple fact is that guys are bigger and stronger and working out more in the offseason than they were in the old days,” he said.
And they're hitting off weaker pitchers. If not weak in the physical sense, many pitchers getting a first-hand look at major league hitters today would be watching from the bleachers 25 years ago.
“That's the biggest problem, the pitchers themselves,” Brennaman said. “You've got guys pitching in the big leagues today who would be in Class A ball, Double A at best. And that's not going to improve when you expand every three or four years.”
Arizona pitching ace Randy Johnson added to the list of problems the strike zone, which seems different with every umpire.
“That's not going to change, you've got veteran umpires who aren't going to change how they've called it for 15 or 20 years, which is fine,” he said. “That'd be like asking me to change my pitching motion, but maybe you could raise the mound up to help out.”
And that's what most discussions come back to: raising the mound. You can't limit how strong hitters are, you can't do anything about expansion pitching, and with the game's insistence that the ball is not juiced, raising the mound seems to many the easiest and most obvious solution.
Raising the mound
“No question about it, I don't know why it was ever lowered in the first place,” Anderson said. “I'm not going to have anything to do with it, but I'd love to see them raise the mound back to where it should be and see what kind of numbers you get. You'd know immediately, it'd be just like 1969, only the other way around.”
Pitchers have an advantage on a higher mound because of trajectory. It's easier for them to hit spots from higher ground — especially spots low in the strike zone. The more angle that a pitch has, the harder it is to hit solidly.
“Flatter pitches get crushed,” said Connor. “You're trying to move the bat off the ball just a fraction of an inch. A fraction of an inch can be the difference between a home run and a fly out.”
And that's not all. The flatter the pitch, the more time it spends in what is called the “swing zone.” The swing zone is the place where a batter's swing and the pitch can meet.
“Think about it,” said Reds pitcher Denny Neagle. “If my pitch is coming down at an angle, it's not in the hitter's swing zone as much as if it's flat. A hitter has so many more chances to hit a flat pitch, he can be late and go to right field or be early and pull the ball. But if it's angled, he's just got that one spot, and that makes it a hell of a lot harder.”
The rulebook calls for mounds to be 10 inches above homeplate. Players say that different mounds around the league vary — Neagle said Philadelphia had the highest, estimating it to be 12 inches — but it's nothing like before 1969, when regulation was 15 inches.
“I remember going to Dodger Stadium,” Anderson said. “Their mound, it looked like Mount Everest out there in the middle of the field. It had to be around 18 inches. We used to run ours up, too. I'm sure there's still some that are raised a little, but I tell you what, there sure aren't no Mt. Everests out there, I know that.”
Medical benefits raised
Raising the mound almost certainly would save more than a few pitchers' ERAs, that's not a new concept. But what many around the game don't realize is that there are significant medical benefits to the move as well, meaning a pitcher's arm could be saved along with his ERA.
“I've always been a big proponent of raising the mound back to 15 inches and giving pitchers back some of the leverage that's disappeared,” said Cam Bonifay, general manager of the Pittsbugh Pirates. “When we first looked at it, it was from two perspectives. One, a medical aspect. You see so many pitchers spending a lot of days on the disabled list. Then also, making it a more even game for everybody.”
The latter everybody knows about. The former, that's a different story. Not having to deal with injuries to high-priced pitchers is especially intriguing to small-market teams like Pittsburgh and Kansas City.
“It would save a lot of money on pitchers' injuries,” said Royals GM Herk Robinson. “I think at any time, there could be $100 million (of pitchers' salaries) on the disabled list.”
Typical injuries to pitchers come from continued and excessive use. While a position player may break a bone or sprain an ankle, a pitcher is more likely to tear an arm muscle, the result of normal wear and tear.
With many throwing more in the offseason, baseball has seen a rash of injuries to its pitchers.
Timothy Kremchek, Reds team doctor, compared it to cutting a rope with a butterknife.
“The first couple swipes, that's not going to do anything,” he said. “But after a thousand swipes, the rope is going to be frayed and frayed and finally it's going to break. That's what happens with a pitcher.”
Anything that can be done to lessen the effects of pitching — dulling the knife — will help lessen the risk of injury.
“Throwing a baseball is one of the most strenuous things you can do to your body, it's a very unnatural act,” Kremchek said. “Having the mound higher puts the pitcher at an advantage because the ball naturally wants to go down. Now he can do that better with less stress on the shoulder. The lower the mound, the more stress that goes on your back, your shoulder and ultimately your elbow for the same result.”
Pitchers have a tendency to try to throw harder as they tire. Once a pitcher does that, Kremchek said, their arm naturally drops.
“That places even more stress on the inside of the elbow, and that's how you get the Tommy John injury.”
That's an injury that few have come back from. John and Cleveland's Steve Karsay are among the lucky, but there are others like former Reds ace Jose Rijo, who never recovered. Reds reliever Mark Wohlers faces a similar challenge, as does Chicago Cubs phenom Kerry Wood.
It doesn't stop there. A pitcher such as Neagle not only would put less stress on his arm each pitch, but because he would be effectively harder to hit, there would be fewer pitches to wear down his $4.75 million arm and shoulder.
“You'd get better pitch efficiency,” Neagle said. “Now I don't have to throw as many pitches to get through seven or eight innings or whatever. That's obviously less stress right there, so it can help that way, too.”
There's no telling if a higher mound could have prevented Neagle's weak shoulder that has him on the disabled list. But one thing is certain, Kremchek said: “It sure couldn't hurt.”
Not everybody is so confident that adding more dirt to the mound would help clean up pitching. Reds pitcher Brett Tomko has surrendered 18 home runs this season.
“The reason I've had problems with that is not because of the mound, it's because of bad pitches,” he said. “It might help a little, but I don't think it would be very much. I don't think changing the mound is the answer, it's up to the pitchers to adjust. You can blame it on a lot of things, but the pitchers need to adjust.”
Kremchek isn't surprised that many around the game don't see the potential medical benefits of a higher mound.
“They just don't understand what it could do,” he said. “Everywhere I go, people ask me how we can reduce injuries to pitchers, because that's our biggest problem right now. I'm telling you, reducing stress on the arm is the best way to do that, and lowering the mound would definitely help.
“You'd see results. The big-time results would be over time, but I think the results would be significant, they would be absolutely significant. Over a period of time, it would mean less stress and less injury.”
Kremchek added that for the results to fully be seen, a higher mound would have to be employed by the minor leagues, colleges and even high schools, since that's where the most overuse occurs.
Bridging the Gap
A natural and predictable division exists in the mound debate. Hitters, putting up power numbers never before seen, don't want to change anything. Pitchers, on the other hand, are looking for something, anything at all, to help even the score.
But the possible medical benefit — forget curbing power numbers — of raising the mound is something everyone can agree on.
“If people realized that there was the potential to decrease injuries in our pitchers, there would be a lot more people on the bandwagon and very interested in making this change,” Kremchek said. “Nobody wants to see a player hurt. ... I absolutely think the enthusiasm would be much greater if they comprehended what this could do. Certainly you're not going to totally halt injuries. But hey, if you can take away just 10 injuries from pitchers per year, that's tremendous.
“That's something that everybody — pitchers, hitters, coaches, GM's and fans — would be all for.“
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