MLB: Five Pitches That Changed Everything

There are plenty of pitches now in the MLB that are quite commonplace, but they all needed to begin somewhere. Let’s look back through baseball history and look at the pitches that changed everything.

The Origins Of Pitching A Baseball

In the days when organized baseball leagues were first formed in the middle of the 19th century, the job of the pitcher was to make the batter hit the baseball. And if you tried to get the batter out, you were thrown out of the game, or even worse, fired from your job. As a result, strikeouts were extremely rare and hitters ruled the game, often yelling out to the pitcher to, “Put one in about right here “.

As you might imagine, that spirit did not sit well with some of the pitchers who were having their natural competitive sports instincts severely tested. So, it was only natural that a few of them would begin experimenting with the baseball.

They noticed, for example, that the ball has seams. And that a pitched ball had a tendency to “move” instead of going on a trajectory straight to the plate depending on how the ball was held. This raised even more curiosity.

They counted the seams on the baseball too and they further noticed that the ball moved differently depending on whether fingers were placed over two seams or four seams. And even more if the fingers were placed across the seams.

It was inevitable that sooner or later the spirit of experimentation would produce pitches that would be designed to get hitters out. And with that, the whole landscape of baseball would be changed forever.