MLB Pitcher’s Mound Effect on Batting Averages
As a major fan of sports, I wanted to look more into a topic in which I had been following all year due to my hometown team winning this year in baseball. Sports are notorious for keeping close statistics about everything, especially nowadays with gambling on specific performances on certain players on a week-to-week basis. Recording statistics in sports create change for their future, such as rule changes, gameplay changes, and equipment modifications.
In 1968, Major League Baseball called its season, “The Year of the Pitcher”. That year players batting averages have been thee lowest ever recorded at a measly .237%. Since 1921, the average had been progressively going down yearly from .291%. The pitchers began to have too much advantage over the batters and became strong enough to begin killing the excitement of the game. The mound was raised at 15 to 20 inches, prior to 1968 to give the pitchers an advantage to throw more downwards with leverage to get swing and misses, and that they did. The problem was the hitting became less, and games became less entertaining. Major League officials believed that it was becoming too dominant and was ruining the game.
The next year, 1969, lowering of the mound in was intended to "increase the batting" once again, as pitching had become increasingly too dominant. The mound was lowered to 10 inches off the ground and was strict on that rule, due to some teams’ fields having it higher to help them throughout the season while playing at home. Through statistics kept year after year, this new restrictive rule apparently did its job. The average went up to .248%, then .254% following, in consecutive years following the change.
My objective is to make almost 200 years of pitching and batting averages easy to read to show that as the mound height changed so did the game. Although numbers do the talking in baseball, visuals provide a simpler way to understand them. A “average line” with batting average and pitching ERA (Earned Run Average) helps the viewers eye through the graphs trend. The one variable that skews this information is the “Steroid Era”, beginning late 1980’s and ending around mid to late 2000’s. As the graphs show, the significant spike in batting average is noticeably different than the trend and it has gone back down to about the average once again.
Since the change, batting has become more prominent and allowed the game to played to entertain once again. According to Baseball-Reference.com, I chose to use two complete data charts, having statistics since 1871 on league totals on batting, and pitching, allowed me to create a graphic showing the explanation of the numbers given. The site allowed me to change the statistics to CSV and then export it to excel which helped me organize it better too.
Although I do not know how to efficiently use or work at all Excel, it helped gather all my information and really only needed one equation; average. My method was strictly descriptive, with a sub method of sampling. The pitching mound was probably the most major change in baseball to create an effect in overall numbers. I did weight into the “Steroid Era” as a sample data collection because that had a significant impact on the data’s numbers and averages to affected the mound height argument.
I took both sets of data charts, highlighting the key columns I needed and averaged them out in total, and before and after the mound height change in 1968-1969 season to see if the number correlated to an effective argument on that it had changed the pitching advantage in the game. As seen in figure 1, with no other variables such as outlying years, and the “Steroid Era”. I strictly took the pitchers ERA and that is it. With just using that one line of statistics, more runs were given up by pitchers after the mound had been lowered, simple as that. But it’s not that easy to prove a point. I then looked at the entirety of pitchers ERA before the beginning of records, made a line graph which then allowed me to see trends throughout the years. As stats have it, the increase of pitchers ERA’s began right after the change in mound heights in 1968, after the lowest ERA season in history. Figure 2 shows the trend line of pitchers ERA’s that progressively increase until about 2007-2008. Similar to figure 2 is figure 3, the batting averages of players throughout the years. It correlates with figure 2, if one goes up, so does the other. If pitchers has less of an advantages and their runs allowed goes up that means batters’ averages goes up and they score more runs, also seen beginning to rise in 1968. In figure 4, it’s a side by side comparison of batting averages and pitchers ERA starting in 1968 to show the increase in a closer and more detailed version.
With previous knowledge, I knew there had been a time period in which hitting was at an all-time high and that time is now what we call “The Steroid Era”. It was a time in baseball where players were using performance enhancing drugs to hit the ball harder and further and more often. It gave them an unfair advantage then. Without that background knowledge, the charts look as if the pitching just got significantly worse, but in hindsight we know it wasn’t the pitching. It was a variable in the data collection and obviously in the visual graphs that I want to point out because it is very noticeable in all of them. After the league started to crack down and ban players, really beginning in 2008, the numbers dropped back into the normal averages as seen in figures 2 and 3 after the increase lines.
In 1968, Major League Baseball called its season, “The Year of the Pitcher”. That year players batting averages have been thee lowest ever recorded at a measly .237%. Since 1921, the average had been progressively going down yearly from .291%. The pitchers began to have too much advantage over the batters and became strong enough to begin killing the excitement of the game. The mound was raised at 15 to 20 inches, prior to 1968 to give the pitchers an advantage to throw more downwards with leverage to get swing and misses, and that they did. The problem was the hitting became less, and games became less entertaining. Major League officials believed that it was becoming too dominant and was ruining the game.
The next year, 1969, lowering of the mound in was intended to "increase the batting" once again, as pitching had become increasingly too dominant. The mound was lowered to 10 inches off the ground and was strict on that rule, due to some teams’ fields having it higher to help them throughout the season while playing at home. Through statistics kept year after year, this new restrictive rule apparently did its job. The average went up to .248%, then .254% following, in consecutive years following the change.
My objective is to make almost 200 years of pitching and batting averages easy to read to show that as the mound height changed so did the game. Although numbers do the talking in baseball, visuals provide a simpler way to understand them. A “average line” with batting average and pitching ERA (Earned Run Average) helps the viewers eye through the graphs trend. The one variable that skews this information is the “Steroid Era”, beginning late 1980’s and ending around mid to late 2000’s. As the graphs show, the significant spike in batting average is noticeably different than the trend and it has gone back down to about the average once again.
Since the change, batting has become more prominent and allowed the game to played to entertain once again. According to Baseball-Reference.com, I chose to use two complete data charts, having statistics since 1871 on league totals on batting, and pitching, allowed me to create a graphic showing the explanation of the numbers given. The site allowed me to change the statistics to CSV and then export it to excel which helped me organize it better too.
Although I do not know how to efficiently use or work at all Excel, it helped gather all my information and really only needed one equation; average. My method was strictly descriptive, with a sub method of sampling. The pitching mound was probably the most major change in baseball to create an effect in overall numbers. I did weight into the “Steroid Era” as a sample data collection because that had a significant impact on the data’s numbers and averages to affected the mound height argument.
I took both sets of data charts, highlighting the key columns I needed and averaged them out in total, and before and after the mound height change in 1968-1969 season to see if the number correlated to an effective argument on that it had changed the pitching advantage in the game. As seen in figure 1, with no other variables such as outlying years, and the “Steroid Era”. I strictly took the pitchers ERA and that is it. With just using that one line of statistics, more runs were given up by pitchers after the mound had been lowered, simple as that. But it’s not that easy to prove a point. I then looked at the entirety of pitchers ERA before the beginning of records, made a line graph which then allowed me to see trends throughout the years. As stats have it, the increase of pitchers ERA’s began right after the change in mound heights in 1968, after the lowest ERA season in history. Figure 2 shows the trend line of pitchers ERA’s that progressively increase until about 2007-2008. Similar to figure 2 is figure 3, the batting averages of players throughout the years. It correlates with figure 2, if one goes up, so does the other. If pitchers has less of an advantages and their runs allowed goes up that means batters’ averages goes up and they score more runs, also seen beginning to rise in 1968. In figure 4, it’s a side by side comparison of batting averages and pitchers ERA starting in 1968 to show the increase in a closer and more detailed version.
With previous knowledge, I knew there had been a time period in which hitting was at an all-time high and that time is now what we call “The Steroid Era”. It was a time in baseball where players were using performance enhancing drugs to hit the ball harder and further and more often. It gave them an unfair advantage then. Without that background knowledge, the charts look as if the pitching just got significantly worse, but in hindsight we know it wasn’t the pitching. It was a variable in the data collection and obviously in the visual graphs that I want to point out because it is very noticeable in all of them. After the league started to crack down and ban players, really beginning in 2008, the numbers dropped back into the normal averages as seen in figures 2 and 3 after the increase lines.
![](http://www.weebly.com/weebly/images/file_icons/xls.png)
leagues_mlb_bat_teams_standard_batting.csv |
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leagues_mlb_pitch_teams_standard_pitching.xlsx |