The Most Revolutionary Baseball Players of All Time

The game of baseball is perhaps the most consistently evolving sport ever. While football, basketball, tennis and golf are relatively unchanged from the way they were played a century ago, baseball as it was played in the late 19th century might be almost unrecognizable to most fans today. And I'm not talking about the fact that so many players are of a color other than white.

Most of the changes were not institutional, mandated by the baseball overlords, but rather came about as a result of revolutionary baseball players who saw a way to gain an advantage and seized the opportunity.

One of the most revolutionary baseball players in history stands apart from the crowd in several ways. Unlike practically any of his contemporaries and the overwhelming majority of today's players, Charles Zimmer had been a college scholar and a member of the Brotherhood, a collection of the best brains in baseball in the late 1800s who were committed to labor reform. Another of Zimmer's accomplishments was playing an integral role in the transformation of a simple country hurler into a sophisticated pitching machine. The hayseed's name? Cy Young.

But Zimmer tops the list of revolutionary baseball players by virtue of what he did during the 1887 season. Prior to that time baseball catchers had stood anywhere from ten to twenty feet behind the batter. Take a minute to think about that. If played in the same way today, since the pitcher is sixty and a half feet away from the batter, that means the catcher, depending on his style, would be as much as a third of that distance away from the batter himself. By the time the ball reached the catcher it could have traveled eighty feet. Because of this extra distance, one of the primary tactics used by some pitchers back then was to try for a foul tip that would bounce back into the glove of the catcher. Hard to imagine nowadays, but I'll bet it was interesting to watch.