Hello and welcome to episode 967 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball

perspective presented by the play index at BaseballRefence.com and our Patreon supporters. I am

Ben Menderig of the Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello!

Yo! Hey! Hi!

Had a busy day but we needed to talk about our old pal John Lester. So we will get the

John Lester in just a second. A couple things before we begin. First, do you know where the

mountain came from?

I don't! That's a great question!

Well it turns out no one knows where the mountain came from. I was just reading the most recent

edition of Craig Wright's a page from Baseball's past newsletter which I highly recommend. I

always learned something and today what I learned was that no one knows where the mountain

started or who started it or when it started exactly. We know that it was kind of officially

codified in 1903 although at that point it was just a maximum height so there was no standardized

height. It could be less than that height if people wanted it to and often they did. But the

interesting thing was that there was never a point where people just said, hey, pitcher should

be able to stand on something. It was just a thing that happened organically during that period where

pitchers would go to the groundskeeper and say, hey, can you just sort of surreptitiously build

this little pile of dirt for me here and angle it toward the plate and so it just kept happening and

it kept getting bigger and bigger until people noticed it and could see it from the press box and

could see it from the stands and then eventually they had to do something about it and actually put

it in the rules but it just happened like that basically just everyone cheating was how the

mountain happened. That's bizarre and you know it's especially bizarre about it is I remember

...