If you could go back in time 150 years or so, near the dawn of professional baseball, what would the sport look like?
You'd recognize it, but you'd quickly see something markedly different: The pitchers are throwing underhand. Check out this print titled "Grand Match for the Championship at the Elysian Fields, Hoboken, New Jersey." The Library of Congress dates it to 1866, five years before the National Association began play as the first professional league in 1871. Note, in particular, how the pitcher is delivering the ball.
As Rob Neyer and Bill James wrote in "The Neyer/James Guide to Pitching" about the early days of baseball, "At the start of major league baseball in 1871, pitchers were not supposed to be the focus of the game. A pitcher's job was to deliver the ball, to start the action -- but not to get the batter out." Early rules required the pitcher to throw with a stiff wrist and elbow. Baseball historian John Thorn wrote about the evolution of pitching at his Our Game blog:
First, we see that the pitcher came by his name from the underhand, stiff-armed, stiff-wristed pitch borrowed from cricket’s early days -- a delivery much like that seen today at the bowling alley. Second, we see the disdain of the "gentlemanly" Knickerbockers of New York for the unÂcouth throw, which characterized the rival version of baseball that flourished in New England until the Civil War. (Indeed, the term pitcher has been a misnomer in baseball ever since the mid-1860s, when the wideÂspread -- though not yet legal -- wrist snap transformed the respectable pitch into the lowly throw.) And third, we see that the pitcher was not required to throw strikes rather than balls (the former did not exist until 1858, the latter until 1863), but instead to pitch for the bat: In other words, he and the batter were not adversaries but very nearly allies, each doing his utmost to put the ball in play for the valiant barehand fielders. Of all the positions in the game's original 1845 design, only right field was less demanding and less prestigious than pitcher.
As Thorn alludes to, pitchers soon stretched the limits of the rules. They could throw harder with a wrist snap and started shifting from a strict underhand motion to more of a submarine style: A sport full of Brad Zieglers. The Brooklyn Excelsiors reportedly paid a pitcher named Jim Creighton under the table in the 1860s, making him the first professional and suggesting pitchers -- or at least some of them -- were not merely delivering the ball so the batter could whack away. Like softball, however, games in the early days of baseball were high-scoring affairs. In the National Association's first season, teams scored on an average of 10.3 runs per game.
By the time the National League began play in 1876, pitchers -- combined with low-quality manufacturing of baseballs -- had started to assert more dominance and runs per game dropped to 5.9. George Bradley of St. Louis spun 16 shutouts, although apparently he had a trick of crushing game balls in a vise to soften them up. It's not clear what kind of delivery Bradley used, but he apparently threw hard and liked to intimidate batters with a "grin" when he pitched.
Back then, there wasn't a pitcher's slab but a box -- which allowed pitchers to take a running start to deliver the ball. And the underhand and sidearm deliveries gradually gave way to overhand pitching. In the mid-1870s, Thorn reports, Tommy Bond began to raise his sidearm delivery slightly above his waist and "it was only a matter of time before 'anything goes' became the standard. Pitchers' motions were creeping up to a three-quarters, 'from the shoulder' style in the early 1880s." Tony Mullane was another who tested the rules and dared the umpires to crack down. By 1883 the rules allowed a pitcher to throw from shoulder height. In 1884, all restrictions were removed. Charlie Sweeney of Providence would struck out 19 men in a game that year, a record that stood until Roger Clemens broke it in 1986.
Finally, in 1893, the pitcher's box was eliminated and a slab of rubber placed at 60 feet, 6 inches. Modern baseball was born.
As you can see in this footage of Christy Mathewson, baseball's best pitcher in the first decade of the 20th century, his motion wasn't any different than what you see today:
Walter Johnson, regarded by some as the hardest thrower in history, used a sidearm, whip-like delivery:
I'm not sure Johnson threw as hard as pitchers today; maybe he did. James has speculated that Johnson was the first to throw hard on every pitch, which made him seem faster than other pitchers. Mathewson, in his book "Pitching in a Pinch," wrote about having to save your best stuff for key moments. In the deadball era, prior to 1920, without much of a threat of players hitting home runs, this was possible.
Once offense picked up in the 1920s, pitchers had to start throwing hard all the time. It became popular to use the big windmill windup -- see Bob Feller in action -- the theory, I guess, that it added more power. Of course, that delivery entailed a lot of moving parts; perhaps not coincidentally, Feller and pitchers of his era were pretty wild. Feller walked as many 208 batters in a season (although his control improved as he got older) and walks per game peaked in 1949 at 4.04 per nine innings. The 1949 Yankees featured Tommy Byrne (179 walks), Vic Raschi (138 walks) and Allie Reynolds (123 walks) ... and won the World Series.
By the 1960s the windmill windup had largely disappeared. Luckily, however, unique deliveries have remained in the game. From Juan Marichal's high leg kick -- how did he keep his balance? -- to Fernando Valenzuela staring up at the sky to Carter Capps' somehow-legal hop-stop delivery, we still identify many hurlers simply by their motion.
Yes, deliveries have become much more uniform and clean these days, without excessive movement, and those mechanics have certainly led to better control and better pitching, maybe even helped create this generation of flamethrowers. Of course, if we're worried that pitchers have become too good, we can always go back to the rules of the 1860s: Pitching underhand with a stiff arm.
