Pitching Rubbers for Dummies

Distance to pitcher's rubber, major
league baseball diamond

Some of the internet freelancers our research staffers uncover during their searches have fallen back on a time-honored technique of obfuscation: if you don't know jack about your subject, bury that lack under an avalanche of factoids and miscellaneous rubbish you lift from authoritative sources. One practitioner of this technique the kids have uncovered is eHow.com contributor W. D. Adkins, a self-described "professional journalist" and the possessor of multiple liberal arts MA degrees (we'll need to look at his science articles more closely). Some of his articles are veritable blizzards of verbosity, but the sad fact is that ignorance will out, just as it did when he posted "How to Measure Distances for the Pitching Rubber" at SportsRec.com.

W. D., William to his friends, went straight to the Baseball Almanac for this information, and – we'll be honest – he did a (fairly) good job of rewording the instructions for laying out a major league baseball diamond; though that's not quite what the OQ asked. That's not to say that Adkins got everything right, however, either grammatically or geometrically. For instance, he informed his readers that step one of locating the rubber is

"Starting from the tip of the apex at the back of home plate, measure a distance of exactly 127 feet, 3 3/8 inches to where you want to position second base." The number may be right, but the grammar isn't: we'd expect a "professional journalist" to recognize the redundancy of "the tip of the apex," wouldn't you? But maybe that's just being catty... Next, as he explained how to lay out the field (which wasn't the question), he said to "Stretch a string from the back of home plate to second base. Measure a distance along the string from the back of home plate of exactly 60 feet and 6 inches. This is the point that will be the center of the pitching rubber."

Ummm, no: the 60 foot six inch distance is to the center of the front edge of the rubber. Placing it at the center would mean the rubber is three inches too close. Although Adkins wouldn't notice the discrepancy, you can be sure Chris Sale or Jake Arrieta would! That's the kind of accuracy you get from a fake expert...

We also noticed that Adkins was apparently unaware of or decided to ignore the difference in field dimensions at different levels of play. The 60'-6" distance is correct only for high school age players and above; for Little League the rubber is 46 feet from home, for Pony League, 54 feet. And then there's softball, where the distance varies from 38 to 53 feet depending on the game being played. In other words, William spent too much time rewording how to lay out a baseball diamond and not enough time thinking about what sports have "pitchers." Should he be our Dumbass of the Day? Yes, he should.

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