Home plate is where most of the excitement in baseball is concentrated, where the winning point is scored or where the elimination is scored with a strikeout.
That point of the field is also a base but it is different from the other three, and here comes the question: why is home base a pentagon? The shape that the house currently has was obtained after going through two previous phases, arriving at the one we know from the year 1901.
In the early years of baseball (late 1800s), the house plate did not have an official shape but its presentation was basically round objects made of different materials. Some of these were cymbals or discs, which are believed to have led to the name “house dish”, or as it is also known today,
the first change
Upon reaching the year 1900, the rules stipulated that the home base had to be the same shape as the rest of the bases, so they were made squares, measuring 12 inches on each side. The dish was laid out with one of the vertices facing the thrower and the other facing the receiver. These bases were made of stone or marble. The home plate position and the material it was made of caused the corner injury on the third base side to players who slipped (usually cut).
Pentagon
How dangerous it was to have a square house plate led to the creation of the pentagon. In 1901, Robert Keating created the five-sided house plate. The arrangement was decided because the two sides facing the catcher point directly to the third and first baseline, and because that position made it possible to make the strike zone more visible to both the pitcher and the umpire, which allowed greater consistency. to payer calls.
These reasons are what caused the change from a round object to a square and a pentagon, with the main logic being that the home base should have a different shape because its purpose in the game is different from that of the other bases, especially to determine the strike zone.
Source: Clarin
