Look, we agree that too much emphasis is placed on velocity and spin. I don't think Greg Maddux would get a sniff today, because 91 was about his top speed. Guy could throw a golf ball into a soup can and he wouldn't have gotten past college baseball.
That has to have something to do with all this elbow damage, especially given hardly anyone putches 9 innings anymore.
But, moving the mound back had nothing to do with analytics. It was done in the 1890s. Nobody was using advanced metrics then.
It was actually done for the fairness to batters, because guys were hitting 85/86 by then and from the old distance that was like 93 to 95 today. The game became a groundout or bunt single game because nobody could catch up to a pitch that short a distance. The game got boring & people stopped attending.
Interestingly though, I found this about the experiments in the minors with pushing the mound back (which I didn't know was happening).
Studies by the American Sports Medicine Institute demonstrated no meaningful differences in measures of rotational motion or acceleration for pitchers throwing from distances as far as 63 feet, 8 inches. So there is scientific reason to believe this change will not pose a meaningful increase in injury risk to pitchers. That’s why MLB determined the pitching distance adjustment to be a worthwhile experiment.
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