Amid a concerning decline in television viewership, MLB has spent the past few years experimenting with a variety of rule changes to make the game more palatable including seven-inning doubleheaders, batter minimums for relief pitchers, a cap on mound visits and extra innings beginning with a “ghost” runner on second base. Momentum also seems to be building toward expanded playoffs and a universal DH.
Those changes address MLB’s pace-of-play crisis, but not its on-field product, which has suffered immensely with the increased prevalence of launch angle and infield shifts, trends that have rendered base-stealing and other lost arts like hit-and-runs all but extinct. MLB abandoned its “juiced ball” this season in an effort to keep balls in play (home runs have completely lost their novelty in today’s game, which relies almost exclusively on the “three true outcomes”), but the Atlantic League, an unaffiliated “partner” league of MLB, is taking baseball’s home-run crackdown one step further.
According to Jacob Bogage and Chelsea Janes of the Washington Post, the Atlantic League will experiment by moving the pitching rubber back one foot from 60 feet, six inches to 61’6” beginning in the second half of the 2021 season. In doing so, the Atlantic League will become the first professional league to enact changes to its mound since 1969, when MLB lowered it to give batters a fairer shake amid what had been a pitching renaissance with seven hurlers submitting sub-2.00 ERAs the year prior. Along with a new mound distance, the Atlantic League will also debut a “double hook” rule preventing teams from using a designated hitter once their starting pitcher has been replaced.
Even if the Atlantic League’s changes this year are well-received, it’s anyone’s guess which, if any, of the tweaks will be adopted by MLB and how long it would take to put those new rules into place. After years of resisting change, MLB finally recognizes that in order to stay relevant in an ever-changing entertainment landscape, the sport must evolve … or risk falling further behind the NBA and NFL in America’s sports consciousness.
LISTEN on the Audacy App
Sign Up and Follow Audacy Sports
Facebook | Twitter | Instagram