The Pitcher's Mound

Where did it come from? When? It is the great mystery in the evolution of the game.

It sits out there in the middle of the diamond, with all eyes drawn toward it for the start of every pitch. It is referenced over 20 times in the rule book, and is mentioned numerous times in every broadcast of a game. The managers and players “visit” it. The pitchers “take” it, are “sent” to it, “come off” it, get “pulled” from it, and sometimes get “knocked off” it. But darned if anyone can tell you how it got there … whose idea it was, or when. The pitcher’s mound is the great mystery in the history of the baseball diamond.

The origin of the pitcher’s mound is murky because it came like a thief in the night, a part of the game that was never intended, and it ever so slowly eased its way into becoming a permanent part of the stage. The original ideal of the baseball diamond was an evenly level field that aspired to true consistent bounces of the ball. None of the rule books of the 19^th century indicate a raised up portion of the diamond to assist the pitcher. That’s why some biographers of pitchers from the 1800s write that their subject never pitched off a mound.

Historians specializing in that era will write, as Eric Miklich does: “… all pitching in the 19^th century was done from a flat surface. The ‘pitcher’s mound’ would not make its debut until the 20^th century.”

That’s a mistake, but an understandable one. Because of the shady nature of the pitching mound’s origin, we have only the vaguest notion of when they actually first began. These mounds were taking advantage of a loophole in the rules, that at no point did the rules spell out the implicit assumption of a level diamond. The men who made the first pitching mounds did not want them to be noticed, lest they set off a rule to eliminate what was a landscaping gimmick to help the pitcher.

All we can do is imagine a long ago day when an enterprising pitcher or pitchers, armed with shovels and wheelbarrow, slightly raised the pitcher’s box on their home field, sloping it toward the home plate, creating the first pitcher’s mound. We don’t know who. We don’t know where. We don’t know when.

Some think it was around 1900, while others think it was more around 1890, and one legend goes all the way back to the early 1880s.

The mounds in the young American League were really pushing the notion of what would be acceptable, and the man who said “enough is enough” was Tom Loftus, the manager of the Washington Senators, and a member of the 1903 Joint Rules Committee. Loftus wanted to totally do away with the pitcher’s mound, and he went into the committee meeting saying, “I want a law passed that will keep the pitcher’s box even with the rest of the diamond.” That might have been taken as a sensible proposition in an earlier day, but by the 1902 season it was argued the horse was too far out of the barn. The unofficial pitcher’s mounds were too well established in the game to flatly eliminate them.

The best Loftus could do was to successfully argue that they at least needed to address the pitcher’s mound by limiting its maximum height. And that is how the pitcher’s mound, and an otherwise level diamond, first found their way into the rulebook with Rule 9, section 2: “The pitcher’s plate shall not be more than 15 inches higher than the base lines or the home plate, which shall be level with the surface of the field, and the slope from the pitcher’s plate … shall be gradual.”

Some use that introduction into the rules in 1903 as the basis for saying the pitcher’s mound began in the 20^th century, but there were specific newspaper references in 1899 to the height of the “raised pitcher’s boxes” tending to get higher. And in the reported comments from Loftus before the meeting of the rules committee, and in the reactive comments from players after the rule was passed, it was clear that the pitcher’s mound was not a recent innovation. They were spoken of as a matter-of-fact part of the game that had already existed for years. Lotus said: “I want the pitcher taken off his pedestal and the groundkeeper barred from playing the game. They have been raising the pitcher’s box every year lately, until he is so high that the people in the grandstands can’t see the infielders anymore!”

But the battle against the pitcher’s mound did not end with it finally gaining legitimacy in the rule book.