MLB Is Testing Ways to Fix Baseball’s Boredom Problem

Players and coaches in baseball’s Atlantic League had been dreading the change for more than a year. “I don’t understand why they’re doing it,” Danny Barnes, a relief pitcher for the Long Island Ducks, told me during batting practice a week before its debut at the beginning of August. “That’s a tough one,” said fellow reliever Joe Iorio. “We don’t want it to create injuries.” Ducks manager Wally Backman had heard these complaints and more. “The only reactions I have heard from the players are bad,” he said, sitting at his clubhouse desk at the Ducks home park in Central Islip, N.Y. Backman, who played for 14 seasons in the major leagues and won a World Series with the New York Mets, then mimed zipping his lips before he said too much.

When it happened, the big change was tough to spot from the stands. At an Aug. 11 game between the Ducks and the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs, I pointed it out to the father and son seated beside me: The groundskeepers had moved the pitching rubber back a foot farther from home plate. Since 1893, the white strip where the pitcher stands has been set at 60 feet, 6 inches, but now, in the Atlantic League, it was 61 feet, 6 inches. They were surprised to learn this, but the conversation quickly returned to how nice it was to go to a baseball game without spending hundreds of dollars.