Aaron Boone reacts to MLB’s decision to move the pitcher’s mound back in minor league experiment

DUNEDIN, Fla. — Baseball is a sport steeped in its history and traditions. For over a century, the dimensions of the diamond, recognizable across the world, have stayed the same. But MLB is considering changing that. The league announced Wednesday they will experiment with moving the pitcher’s mound back 12 inches in the independent Atlantic League in the second half of this season.

“That seems pretty, pretty drastic,“ Aaron Boone said before Wednesday’s series finale against the Blue Jays. “But I think ... sometimes the craziest of ideas end up having some traction to them. I think it’s important that you try these things out when you’re trying to consider different things in a league where you can kind of really take some information and see how it works out.”

“My initial response is that it’s pretty aggressive, but I think it’s good that Major League Baseball is trying a number of these things out to kind of see what it looks like and just gather information about it ,” the Yankees manager added. “They look for ways always to hopefully continue to improve and move our game forward.”

That is not always welcome in a sport that prides itself on being one of the few constants in American life over the decades. From high school diamonds to major league ballparks, the pitcher’s mound has been 60-feet, 6-inches away from home plate since 1893. The idea behind moving the mound comes from the league’s desire to see more action and more balls in play. In the age of baseball’s advanced analytics, the dominance of pitchers has resulted in hitters adjusting to where games are dominated by strikeouts and home runs.

“It’s different now than it was 15-20 years ago, in that you see batting averages down and that’s a lot to do with how we use pitching,” Boone said. “Teams still score at a normal clip ... it’s a scoring contest. Teams go a little bit different about doing it now, because frankly hitting is so hard with the amount of nasty pitchers that these guys see on a nightly basis.”

MLB entered into a partnership with the Atlantic League to test out these ideas. This will be the first change of mound regulations in professional baseball since 1969 when MLB lowered the mound. The Atlantic League tried to push the mound back two feet in 2019, before its agreement with MLB, but withdrew the proposal after pushback from pitchers, some citing concern for the health of their arms.

MLB used a study by the American Sports Medicine Institute to point out that “this change was also determined to be safe, as it does not require the pitcher to alter pitching mechanics and there is no evidence of increased injury risk.” The study released in October 2019, however, only examined pitchers throwing fastballs, one National League pitching coach pointed out Wednesday. Breaking and offspeed pitches put more strain on the elbow.

Yankees pitching coach Matt Blake had a more academic response to the announcement.

“It’s something that has kind of been theorized about by a handful of people, just what that impact might be. Obviously moving the mound back gives the hitter more time to see the ball, but at the same time it also gives the ball more time to move,” Blake said. “There’s going to be second order effects of that that I think are harder to estimate what exactly that will look like. There’ll be both positives and negatives on both sides of it.”