1872.1

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Chadwick Wants Pitching Rules Changed

Salience	Prominent
Tags	Base Ball StratagemsBase Ball Stratagems
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City/State/Country:	New York, United States
Modern Address
Game	Base BallBase Ball
Immediacy of Report	Contemporary
Age of Players	AdultAdult
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Text
Sources	New York Clipper, February 17, 1872:
Warning
Comment	Richard Hershberger summarizes, (FB posting, 2/17/2022):   "150 years ago in baseball: Chadwick advocating a loosening of the pitch delivery rules. This will happen, but the timing will be complicated, and a subject for another day. Today we look at Chad's argument. His claim is that pitchers have been routinely violating the delivery rules since Creighton's day, over a decade earlier. He makes the argument that the rules should be brought into alignment with reality. This argument is reasonable on its face, but very peculiar coming from Chadwick. First off, his discussion about the elbow and the wrist is partially off point. There was an ongoing discussion in cricket whether the wrist was involved in a "throw." The eventual consensus was that it is not, allowing for spin bowling. Baseball arrived at the same conclusion, and in fact had five years earlier. The 1867 rules added language defining what was a "throw," discussing the elbow but with no mention of the wrist. Chadwick was on the rules committee that recommended this, yet here he is writing as if he did not know the rule. It gets worse. He argues that pitchers have been illegally throwing the ball for over a decade, but he never thought to mention this before this year, despite having the bully pulpit as the rules guy published in multiple venues, and the cricket background to understand the issue. And we have to figure that he was one of the two or three persons who heard Lillywhite's comment. This is,, so far as I know, the earliest mention of that comment, here thirteen years later (Chad having misremembered that the cricket visit was in 1859). Yet only know does he tell us about it. What changed? This being Chad, he might had sat up in the middle of the night, turned to his wife, said "Gadzooks! They are throwing the ball!" and ran with it from there. This doesn't seem to match with any of his usual ideological priors. It seems pretty random. This might also seem like a trivial discussion of an obscure obsolete rule, but it in fact will be hugely important to the development the game, opening the door to modern overhand and curve ball pitching. More on this later."      Edit with form to add a comment
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Submitted by	Richard Hershberger
Submission Note	FB posting, 2/17/2022
Has Supplemental Text

1872.1 Chadwick Wants Pitching Rules Changed"

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