Very interesting story. I’ve always been a big power pitcher fan going back to Tom Seaver, Nolan Ryan, JR Richards and others.
In the 60’s the pitching dominated…guys like Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale and Bob Gibson…battiing averages fell and hitting declined. MLB lowered the mound. It helped the hitters.
This is a little outside the box, but MLB could lower or eliminate the mound or move the pitching rubber back. Eliminating the shifts might help. Somebody will come up with the solution. Watching hitters flail and hit .240 and trying to tell us batting averages don’t matter…we are not stupid. They matter a great deal.
There is an independent league in the Northeast that is serving as a guinea pig for MLB this year, using a number of experimental things that MLB believes could improve the game. One of those is a 62 foot, 6 inch distance from the mound to home plate. It hasn’t helped decrease strikeouts, though. In fact, strikeouts are up slightly over where they were last season. Walks are the same.
I agree with what Don Mattingly said in the Washington Post story - hitting needs to be taught better. The obsession with launch angles and exit velocities has led to batters taking more poor swings.
The last paragraph tells you all about whats happening with youngsters. MLB TV is ruining baseball with all there stats and crap
.To hell with war whatever it means. don’t care. :x
Rich Hill of the LAD agrees the shift should be eliminated.
https://www.tampabay.com/sports/rays/20 … d-display/
You can find the twitter link in the article…I better not post this one.
You sure don’t see hitter shorten up and make contact with 2 strikes! It’s all out every swing. Casey Martin is a good example of it. He stikes out a lot and very rarely sees that many strikes. Fletcher and Heston can be K victims as well as you don’t have to throw them a strike either.
You could move the mound to 90 feet and it won’t change the poor AB’s!