Make the clay wider?

Well, poke me in the eye with a sharp stick! I wuz about as far wrong as I could possibly be!

What you propose would of course work. However, I strongly caution anyone who gets out there with a sod cutter or a tractor to think before you leap!

Except in a very few places, where there's grass, there is probably irrigation. If your infield is irrigated normally, you'll likely have "heads" along the edge of the turf. MOVE THEM FIRST!

You'll probably only have to move at most 6 heads and its no big deal, but remember the old saying, "Measure twice, cut once!"

Now for the explanation.

I must have missed something in the original post. I thought you were talking about the mound and thought you had gone nuts!

I held off on replying to the "flat vs. mound" posts until I got the answer to my question, so now I get to opine about that too.

One of the least thought about things in pitching is one of the most important, and that's the slope of the mound. People, me included, get all caught up in the height, but that isn't the only important thing. The height and slope work together.

Since its pretty much accepted that throwing on the "flat" is less stressful, and throwing from a raised position is beneficial to the pitcher, you have to be very careful how those things are juggled.

Hopefully Rich can dig back in the old archives somewhere because I haven't been able to find the answer to this. What was the height and slope of the mound before they lowered it?

If we can all agree that the most important part of pitching is the ability to repeat the same mechanics over and over, why would anyone want to risk that delicate timing worked so hard to achieve by flipping back and forth from flat to sloped?

Its one thing to work on the motion, separation, balance, grips and what not from the flat, but when you start really "pitching" now you're messing with timing and release point issues. I suppose if one is good enough, he could make the adjustments, but to me you're playing Russian Roulette.

Consider the proper slope of the mound, 1" drop per foot from 6" in front of the rubber. What would it matter if the mound were 10" or 18" high if the slope were the same? If guns were used to pitch, all that would happen is the pitches would just be 8" higher in the "zone".

If the adjustment were made to compensate to get those 8" back, only the angle of the gun would need to be changed. But pitchers aren't stationary guns! A lot of things go into a pitch to get that change in angle.

If the slope were constant, a pitcher would have to change his release point to make the ball come down. But if the slope were increased, no change at all would be necessary.

To keep this short as possible, I won't even try to go into all of the things that are happening on the mound when a pitch is thrown, but I will say this. Mucking around with the mounds and having pitchers throw on mounds of different heights, slopes and even with different soils can cause injuries at worst, and will affect a pitcher at best!

Personally, I love the temporary mounds, especially for kids. the hardest thing to do with young pitchers is to get them to be consistent, and by making the mounds all the same, it removes that as a factor.

So, if someone is advocating practice pitching from the flat, before I'd let my kid or any other pitcher do that, I'd make darn sure it was very well explained by the person advocating it, and totally understood by the pitcher, exactly what was going on.