December 3, 2025 • 8 mins
Discover how the "Year of the Pitcher" in 1968 reshaped baseball forever on Daily Sports History. Learn why MLB lowered the pitching mound and reduced the strike zone to boost offense, following historic seasons by Bob Gibson, Denny McLain, and others. Explore the ripple effects of this pivotal rule change on the game and its evolution. Hashtags
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
On December third, nineteen sixty eight, after one of the
most dominating years of pitching in Major League Baseball history,
which became known as the Year of the Pitcher, major
League Baseball voted to lower the picture mound to increased
offense to get fans back excited for the game after
one of the worst offensive seasons in history. Today, we're
(00:22):
going to dive into what happened to make this change
and how it's affected the league ever since, and is
something the league continues to try to do is increase
offense and have fan experience be number one today on
Daily Sports History. Welcome to Daily Sports History. I'm Ethan Rees,
(00:46):
your guide as you daily learn more about sports history,
increasing your sports knowledge. As today we talk about lowering
of the pitching mound, and today's trivia question to listen
out for is what other rule was changed to help
increase offense after the nineteen sixty eight season. In all
of sports, there's always the adage that defense wins championships,
(01:11):
the offense sells tickets. And you see that over the
years that each league, whenever they make changes to the league,
it's always gears to help the offense rather than defense,
because the more scoring. No matter what the sport, the
more people like it. Not many of us like a
shutout of any sport. We want someone to score. We
want a win to happen somehow. So we need we
(01:34):
have a need in a want to see scoring, and
baseball had an issue back in nineteen sixty eight, which
is now known as the Year of the Pitcher. As
up until that point in the modern era, it was
very rare for a pitcher to have an ra for
a season under two point zero, and this season had
seven different pitchers have an RORA under two, with the
(01:55):
lowest being Bob Gibson, who had an ray of one
point one two. That was the lowest ray ever done
in Major league history and was only matched by Satchel
Page in the Negro leagues in nineteen forty four. All
the other pitchers below one point two all happened before
nineteen twenty. Bob Gibson was a great pitcher, without a doubt,
(02:18):
but this was an outlier for a season, and since
nineteen sixty nine, when they changed the rules, the lowest
ray for a season was by Dwight Goodin for the
New York This year, two pitchers won the Cy Young
and the MVP in their league. Bob Gibson won the
National League and Dinny McClain won the American League MVP
(02:41):
and Cy Young and he had an ERA of one
point ninety six, winning thirty one games. It wasn't only
that the batting average for the league went down to
two hundred and thirty, which was the lowest since the
dead ball era that's pre nineteen twenty and the runs
per game was down to three point twenty four, again
(03:04):
the lowest since nineteen oh eight. And even players that
hit for power struggled, as only one player that season
hit more than thirty seven home runs, and that was
Willie McCovey. So after the season, the MLB got together
and they wanted to change some things around, and they
looked at two possible things to change to increase offense
throughout the league. And what they did was they lowered
(03:25):
the pitcher's mound, which is often known as the Bob
Gibson change. This happened because of Bob Gibson, everyone says,
but it's not just Bob Gibson, it was everyone else.
Bob Gibson was great, had a historic season, but there
were multiple pitchers that had historic seasons that year, and
what they did was they reduced the height of the
pitching mound. Now, if you don't know, the pitching mount
(03:47):
is what is a little bit of a mound of
dirt that the pitcher stands on. It lifts him up
off the earth a little bit. It helps because when
you throw a ball naturally has a gravitational pull down,
so the higher you are up, the easier it is
to pitch. And at the time it was at fifteen
inches and they lowered it down to ten inches, not
(04:07):
only five inches, but this does change a lot. It
changes the trajectory of the ball, so it makes it
a little easier to hit. It's a flatter ball coming in,
and it also lessens the velocity a pitcher can have
as they are not coming downhill as much. Now this
also has an adverse effect as it increases the effort
on the pitchers trying to get more velocity and increases
(04:28):
the risk of them. And since this time, we had
seen a lot more injuries to the shoulder and elbows
of pitchers after this, But it's not a huge gap
that it would be completely noticeable, and it actually had
an immediate effect. The league yer in nineteen sixty eight
was two point ninety eight. It's a very low number.
(04:49):
The following year, in nineteen sixty nine, after they did
this pitching change, it went up to three point six
y' one, which definitely did have an effect. But this
wasn't the only thing that the change. They also changed
the strike zone. Previously, the strike zone was from the
top of the shoulders to the knees, and what they
did is they lowered it to being about where the
armpit is down to the knees. This change lowered the
(05:11):
strike zone meant there was more chance of walks and
allowed pitchers have to be more focused in where they're
throwing the ball, allowing easier balls to be hit by
the hitters. This also helped make that change, but we
often forget about the strike zone change and focus on
the pitching mound change because this was a physical change
to the mound. Physical changes to the sport aren't very common.
(05:34):
Most of the physical changes to the field have not
happened since the eighteen hundreds. They changed the pitching distance
in eighteen ninety three to sixty feet six inches away
from home plate, which it still is at today. The
base path they changed to be officially ninety feet in
eighteen seventy seven. Home plate was given its five sided
(05:55):
pentagon shape in nineteen hundred and that hasn't changed since then.
And even though this was the low point for the
batting average, it wasn't like it just happened. It had
been dropping steadily every year for over eight years. They
had dropped every single year, and since then, the batting
average had not been accumulative in the MLB below two
(06:16):
hundred and fifty six until twenty and eighteen. In between
twenty eighteen and this following year, all but one time
to be below that. So that's why you've seen these
changes they've made to the pitching clock to But these
are rules that the MLB has put in place to
make the game better. And these are two rules that
definitely changed. The strike zone and the mounds size has
(06:39):
changed everything for the game, and it helped the game
more than anything else up to that point. It mad,
it made runs go up, it made batting average go up,
it made the game more fun, and it really saw
its heyday after this point, as baseball players were the
highest paid athletes in the world at the time, and
it really helped grow the sport even more and such
a small change of five change the sport forever. And
(07:04):
if you want more baseball history, I encourage you to
check out a great new podcast I found called My
Baseball History.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
My Baseball History is a long form interview podcast with
and about the people who make baseball what it is,
whether it's a former player, coach, batboy, historian, artist, or collector.
On each episode, I'll talk to someone new who has
some sort of association to the game. I'm your host,
Dan Wallack, and you can follow along with me and
my guest every episode through the pictures and links in
(07:37):
the liner notes at shoelesspodcast dot com, or listen to
My Baseball History wherever you're listening right now.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
I'll put a link in the description below for you
to check out My Baseball History. And I want to
thank you for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed it,
please share it with a friend, say hey, check out
this sports history podcast so we can learn more about
sports history together and go to the bar and win
our trivia night every single night, and come back tomorrow
(08:04):
for more daily sports history. And did you catch the
answer to today's trivia question? What other rule was changed
after the nineteen sixty eight season, and that rule was
the strike zone changing from the top of the shoulders
to the armpits, making it smaller allowing for more offense.
On December third, nineteen sixty eight, after one of the
most dominating years of pitching in Major League Baseball history,
which became known as the Year of the Pitcher, major
League Baseball voted to lower the picture mound to increased
offense to get fans back excited for the game after
one of the worst offensive seasons in history. Today, we're
(00:22):
going to dive into what happened to make this change
and how it's affected the league ever since, and is
something the league continues to try to do is increase
offense and have fan experience be number one today on
Daily Sports History. Welcome to Daily Sports History. I'm Ethan Rees,
(00:46):
your guide as you daily learn more about sports history,
increasing your sports knowledge. As today we talk about lowering
of the pitching mound, and today's trivia question to listen
out for is what other rule was changed to help
increase offense after the nineteen sixty eight season. In all
of sports, there's always the adage that defense wins championships,
(01:11):
the offense sells tickets. And you see that over the
years that each league, whenever they make changes to the league,
it's always gears to help the offense rather than defense,
because the more scoring. No matter what the sport, the
more people like it. Not many of us like a
shutout of any sport. We want someone to score. We
want a win to happen somehow. So we need we
(01:34):
have a need in a want to see scoring, and
baseball had an issue back in nineteen sixty eight, which
is now known as the Year of the Pitcher. As
up until that point in the modern era, it was
very rare for a pitcher to have an ra for
a season under two point zero, and this season had
seven different pitchers have an RORA under two, with the
(01:55):
lowest being Bob Gibson, who had an ray of one
point one two. That was the lowest ray ever done
in Major league history and was only matched by Satchel
Page in the Negro leagues in nineteen forty four. All
the other pitchers below one point two all happened before
nineteen twenty. Bob Gibson was a great pitcher, without a doubt,
(02:18):
but this was an outlier for a season, and since
nineteen sixty nine, when they changed the rules, the lowest
ray for a season was by Dwight Goodin for the
New York This year, two pitchers won the Cy Young
and the MVP in their league. Bob Gibson won the
National League and Dinny McClain won the American League MVP
(02:41):
and Cy Young and he had an ERA of one
point ninety six, winning thirty one games. It wasn't only
that the batting average for the league went down to
two hundred and thirty, which was the lowest since the
dead ball era that's pre nineteen twenty and the runs
per game was down to three point twenty four, again
(03:04):
the lowest since nineteen oh eight. And even players that
hit for power struggled, as only one player that season
hit more than thirty seven home runs, and that was
Willie McCovey. So after the season, the MLB got together
and they wanted to change some things around, and they
looked at two possible things to change to increase offense
throughout the league. And what they did was they lowered
(03:25):
the pitcher's mound, which is often known as the Bob
Gibson change. This happened because of Bob Gibson, everyone says,
but it's not just Bob Gibson, it was everyone else.
Bob Gibson was great, had a historic season, but there
were multiple pitchers that had historic seasons that year, and
what they did was they reduced the height of the
pitching mound. Now, if you don't know, the pitching mount
(03:47):
is what is a little bit of a mound of
dirt that the pitcher stands on. It lifts him up
off the earth a little bit. It helps because when
you throw a ball naturally has a gravitational pull down,
so the higher you are up, the easier it is
to pitch. And at the time it was at fifteen
inches and they lowered it down to ten inches, not
(04:07):
only five inches, but this does change a lot. It
changes the trajectory of the ball, so it makes it
a little easier to hit. It's a flatter ball coming in,
and it also lessens the velocity a pitcher can have
as they are not coming downhill as much. Now this
also has an adverse effect as it increases the effort
on the pitchers trying to get more velocity and increases
(04:28):
the risk of them. And since this time, we had
seen a lot more injuries to the shoulder and elbows
of pitchers after this, But it's not a huge gap
that it would be completely noticeable, and it actually had
an immediate effect. The league yer in nineteen sixty eight
was two point ninety eight. It's a very low number.
(04:49):
The following year, in nineteen sixty nine, after they did
this pitching change, it went up to three point six
y' one, which definitely did have an effect. But this
wasn't the only thing that the change. They also changed
the strike zone. Previously, the strike zone was from the
top of the shoulders to the knees, and what they
did is they lowered it to being about where the
armpit is down to the knees. This change lowered the
(05:11):
strike zone meant there was more chance of walks and
allowed pitchers have to be more focused in where they're
throwing the ball, allowing easier balls to be hit by
the hitters. This also helped make that change, but we
often forget about the strike zone change and focus on
the pitching mound change because this was a physical change
to the mound. Physical changes to the sport aren't very common.
(05:34):
Most of the physical changes to the field have not
happened since the eighteen hundreds. They changed the pitching distance
in eighteen ninety three to sixty feet six inches away
from home plate, which it still is at today. The
base path they changed to be officially ninety feet in
eighteen seventy seven. Home plate was given its five sided
(05:55):
pentagon shape in nineteen hundred and that hasn't changed since then.
And even though this was the low point for the
batting average, it wasn't like it just happened. It had
been dropping steadily every year for over eight years. They
had dropped every single year, and since then, the batting
average had not been accumulative in the MLB below two
(06:16):
hundred and fifty six until twenty and eighteen. In between
twenty eighteen and this following year, all but one time
to be below that. So that's why you've seen these
changes they've made to the pitching clock to But these
are rules that the MLB has put in place to
make the game better. And these are two rules that
definitely changed. The strike zone and the mounds size has
(06:39):
changed everything for the game, and it helped the game
more than anything else up to that point. It mad,
it made runs go up, it made batting average go up,
it made the game more fun, and it really saw
its heyday after this point, as baseball players were the
highest paid athletes in the world at the time, and
it really helped grow the sport even more and such
a small change of five change the sport forever. And
(07:04):
if you want more baseball history, I encourage you to
check out a great new podcast I found called My
Baseball History.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
My Baseball History is a long form interview podcast with
and about the people who make baseball what it is,
whether it's a former player, coach, batboy, historian, artist, or collector.
On each episode, I'll talk to someone new who has
some sort of association to the game. I'm your host,
Dan Wallack, and you can follow along with me and
my guest every episode through the pictures and links in
(07:37):
the liner notes at shoelesspodcast dot com, or listen to
My Baseball History wherever you're listening right now.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
I'll put a link in the description below for you
to check out My Baseball History. And I want to
thank you for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed it,
please share it with a friend, say hey, check out
this sports history podcast so we can learn more about
sports history together and go to the bar and win
our trivia night every single night, and come back tomorrow
(08:04):
for more daily sports history. And did you catch the
answer to today's trivia question? What other rule was changed
after the nineteen sixty eight season, and that rule was
the strike zone changing from the top of the shoulders
to the armpits, making it smaller allowing for more offense.
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