Rob Manfred is apparently pushing that as a possible change in the next couple years. Presumably it would be a mandate that a team must have two IF on each side of 2B, though they could be more demanding.
I'm of two minds about this. The shift lengthens games, the specter of power hitters lining out to 2B is about as unexciting as baseball can be, and low-scoring games are not terribly marketable, even if great pitching can be. On the other hand, you're rewarding the Teixeiras of the world for being utterly incapable of changing their approach. Sooner or later hitters, or the teams in evaluating them, are going to be forced to adjust, and this is a poor way to try to cut down on the adjustment time.
The Wilpons and Steinbrenners aren't losing sleep over WS ratings when their making return on 162 games a year.
You can already see the cost benefit analysis the networks are doing with much of the playoffs moving from network to cable, following regular season games going virtually all cable.
So if they banned the shift I wouldn't weep, but I can appreciate the arguments against doing so as well.
If nothing else they should lay down a bunt towards third base more often when those extreme shifts are put on some hitters. Sure it would take away the extra base hit but if guys perfected their bunting they would have a base hit at will unless the team gave up on the shift.
Honestly, how many of you guys have gone to the batting cages or stepped in against 80/90+ mph? Making contact is not easy. Making legit contact is so difficult that less than 1% of the people who try to do it for a living can actually do it. It's not as easy as "well, he's a pro, he should be able to figure it out"...we're talking about less than a half second of time to decide on a dozen things. It's the single hardest skill in professional sports. The notion that a guy who's honed his swing for 20 years can suddenly wait ...thismuch...longer to start his swing is akin to telling a LH hitter to bat RH. They make it look easy so you think it's easy...try training your body to do ANYTHING different after 20 years of doing the same thing. It's amazingly difficult, and that's why you don't see much success with ANYONE who tries to do it.
This doesn't mean I'm in favor of disallowing the shift...but if baseball wants to remain a viable, interesting sport that the next generations will take interest in, they'd be wise to do it. The NFL has made it exceedingly difficult for defensive backs to play in this league, and the result has been an offensive explosion and the highest ratings and earnings the league has ever seen. Creating more offense in baseball (especially now that PED testing is so tight) is a no-brainer to generate interest in the future of the game. The great pitchers will still be great. The small percentage of hitters who can use the whole field will continue to be stars, and the guys who have been marginalized by the shift will be reborn with very little negative blowback. But this idea that MLB hitters should have to adjust to succeed is going to send the game into a bad, bad place of 3-2 games where good hitters are losing hits due to some dude sitting 10 yards deep in RF making plays that weren't made for the previous 100 years of the game.
Honestly, how many of you guys have gone to the batting cages or stepped in against 80/90+ mph? Making contact is not easy. Making legit contact is so difficult that less than 1% of the people who try to do it for a living can actually do it. .
It is easy without movement. Movement is what makes it difficult. A pitching machine or flat #1 can be hit by many.
The point remains. Baseball has suffered a massive loss in interest in the past 20 years. If they want to turn every game into a 2-1 contest, they're going to suffer some pretty serious consequences. I watch baseball because I love it, but watching my Yankees struggle to score 3 runs every night last season really, really sapped my excitement for a game every night. I'm as die-hard as they get. If they're in danger of losing me, what does that mean for the future of the sport as viable entertainment?
We're going to penalize fielders because a hitter can only hit a ball to one side of the field? That's ludicrous.
If we need runs so badly for ratings and that's what this all comes down to and what is most important, just let everyone do steroids.
Sports have been this way forever. Adjustments, counter-adjustments, etc, etc.
There are so many things that can be changed to improve baseball without forcing fielders to stay in specific places just to make sure that hitters who can't go the other way can get on base.
Even the most skilled hitters cannot adjust their swings to handle the shift effectively. On most shifts, a hitter could have a super-high BA just by bunting to the gap to the opposite side of the pitcher from where the infielders are clustered. Why don't they do it? Because to completely give up on their power swing is terrifying, given the risk that they won't get it back.
Steroids were a scourge, all right, but they at least offset the massive size, length and athleticism of the current generation of pitchers. Adding the shift just gives the team in the field another advantage. Teams averaged 163 HR, .749 OPS and .264 BA in 2008. That has come down in a straight line to 140, .700 and .251. Pitchers are winning, for at least three reasons: lack of PEDs, the change in the physical makeup of pitchers, and the shift. You can't fix the first two, but you can fix the third. The other alternative, making the hitters do better, just won't work. Ever.
It's easy to assign blame for the pace, offensiveness numbers, etc. on defensive alignments, but it's not the villain it's made out to be.
We're going to penalize fielders because a hitter can only hit a ball to one side of the field? That's ludicrous.
Wait...there's one hitter and 9 defenders. No defender in baseball can be "penalized." If a 2B can't get to the ball that a LH hitter pulls, that's a penalty? No. That's the game as it was designed.
The "shift" product isn't nearly as fun as the pre-shift product. I can't see how anyone can argue that. Are you really saying that watching Dan Murphy scoop a ball 20 yards deep in RF is the way this game was intended to be played? I can't agree with that.
You're literally saying "you have to play the field right here even though you know the ball is going to go a few feet to your right" To me, that's absurd.
I do think you're penalizing the fielders by forcing them to stay in one alignment and not allow them to position themselves differently.
I don't need to see scoring all the time to enjoy baseball. I don't enjoy football any more now than I used to because the rules turned into not even being allowed to put a hand on a WR. In fact, I liked when teams could actually play defense.
BUT...what's to prevent the 2B from playing anywhere he wants between 1B and 2B? If the hitter finds that hole, so be it. You can still play towards tendencies without putting 3 guys on one side of a given base. In fact, you could reward your scouting by placing your defenders in a good position to eliminate a pull-hitter.
I won't disagree that there are arguments on both sides, but I'm thinking about the health and well-being of the sport. If baseball continues down this road where runs are nearly impossible to score, we're going to enter a really bad era for the game.
I'll even meet you halfway. Allow the shifts, but lower the mound. Take SOME advantage away from the defense, because if you don't, we might as well be entering the 2nd dead-ball era.
Something's gotta give for the health of the game, and we can sit here all day and put it on the offense to figure it out, but I think deep down, we all know that it might take a decade for the offense to figure it out. Baseball can't afford a 10 year era where nobody scores any runs.
Shit. Do you people really want to watch that kind of game? It'd be literally the death-knell of the sport. Done. Over. Nothing left of the great game that gave us 100 years of really great sport.
The "just-bunt" crowd...you're so deeply missing the forest for the trees, in this argument. You'd turn a great, great game into a totally unwatchable farce.
BUT...what's to prevent the 2B from playing anywhere he wants between 1B and 2B? If the hitter finds that hole, so be it. You can still play towards tendencies without putting 3 guys on one side of a given base. In fact, you could reward your scouting by placing your defenders in a good position to eliminate a pull-hitter.
I won't disagree that there are arguments on both sides, but I'm thinking about the health and well-being of the sport. If baseball continues down this road where runs are nearly impossible to score, we're going to enter a really bad era for the game.
I'll even meet you halfway. Allow the shifts, but lower the mound. Take SOME advantage away from the defense, because if you don't, we might as well be entering the 2nd dead-ball era.
Something's gotta give for the health of the game, and we can sit here all day and put it on the offense to figure it out, but I think deep down, we all know that it might take a decade for the offense to figure it out. Baseball can't afford a 10 year era where nobody scores any runs.
Lowering the mound isn't a terrible idea. MLB had its lowest walk rate per game (2.88) since 1968 (2.82), and the second lowest since 1921 (2.79)... so yeah, basically in the neighborhood of lowest walk rate since the dead-ball era. And pitchers have always tried not to walk people, but walks were undervalued for hitters for most of baseball history, so when you adjust for context (and continually rising strikeout rates), we are in a historically hostile environment for offense.
I think the easiest fix, though, is to shrink the called strike zone (which can probably be accomplished more economically than ever these days - run some off-season training for umpires calling simulated balls and strikes, grade them against PitchF/X enough times, and their strike zones should gradually conform more closely to whatever zone MLB wants to employ). Shrink the strike zone and you will see a drop in K% and a rise in BB%, which is what we really want (BABIP is actually doing perfectly fine league-wide, another reason why I don't see shifts as a real long-term problem).
Seeing fielders forced to stay aligned in one way and watching balls get hit through gaps where they would be but aren't allowed to be just wouldn't sit well with me. And then what's to say people won't start lobbying for outfielders to have to stay positioned at a certain depth and not allow them to cheat in closer to the IF or move back towards the wall? I just don't know if that's a road they should go down.
I don't want to see hitting get completely taken out of the game, I just think that hits that wouldn't occur if the fielders were allowed to position themselves differently would feel cheap.
Lowering the mound would definitely provide a slightly better balance without removing the shift, IMO. I would sooner do that for sure.
I'm not gung ho about doing this but if the strike zone is smaller, I don't know if I'd trust Blue to enforce it correctly.
Shit. Do you people really want to watch that kind of game? It'd be literally the death-knell of the sport. Done. Over. Nothing left of the great game that gave us 100 years of really great sport.
The "just-bunt" crowd...you're so deeply missing the forest for the trees, in this argument. You'd turn a great, great game into a totally unwatchable farce.
Uh, where do I start...
First of all, nobody is going to put seven fielders on the right side of the infield. But I don't think we need a rule that says "you can't put seven players on the right side of the infield", because if a team thinks that's a good idea, knock your socks off, let's see what happens (what happens is the manager gets fired and replaced by a human being with a functional brain). The only rule we need regarding fielding is the one already in place that says the catcher has to remain in position to catch the ball.
Second, in what world would teams continue shifting against a player who can successfully push the ball the other way? Do it two or three times in a row and teams stop shifting you. Try and fail a few times in a row and you stop, either because you figure you like your chances more trying to hit over the shift, or because your manager tells you to stop bunting until you give it more practice. There is no scenario where we see player after player repeatedly try to bunt down the third-base line.
The bunt/swinging bunt against the shift is analogous to a constraint play in football - you might audible to a quick screen if you see you have an obvious WR vs. DB numerical advantage on one side of the formation, but we don't have to worry about a team running nothing but quick screens all day because either the screens fail and the offensive coordinator moves on to another plan, or the screens succeed a couple times and the defensive coordinator starts calling different defenses. It's the same thing with the shift - either you can beat the shift and teams stop shifting, or you can't beat the shift and you go back to your normal offensive approach. I don't see how any of these approaches are a problem or something that spells doom for baseball.
Seriously, does anyone really think that there is a significant number of baseball fans who turn on their TVs, see too many players on one side of the infield, and decide that they're done with baseball because god dammit the shortstop needs to stand where he normally stands even if he's 95% positive that the ball is going to be hit somewhere else? Teams can put their players wherever they want as long as they do so in a timely manner, and BABIP is none the worse for wear (no, really, BABIP is fine league-wide - for all the shifts we see, the number of hitters whose approaches are completely destroyed by the shift is actually pretty small).
I'm not gung ho about doing this but if the strike zone is smaller, I don't know if I'd trust Blue to enforce it correctly.
A few reasons:
One, some people like the traditional aspect of calling balls and strikes based on the inherently flawed judgment of a human being, just like some people like the traditional aspect of having defenders stand where they're "supposed" to stand (note: I know there are other potential arguments against the shift besides tradition - just noting that a lot of the people who are anti-shift are opposed for reasons that mostly boil down to what they think baseball is "supposed" to look like). I would prefer a completely accurate strike zone, but lots of people would be very unhappy if baseball went that route, so if we can get an acceptable fix while keeping human balls and strikes around, I'm okay with that result.
Two, umpires haven't always called such a large zone - it's moved that way over time, and so I don't see why we can't move it back. It won't be perfect, but we don't need everyone to call the bottom of the strike zone at exactly the same height, we just need the average strike zone to shrink by an appropriate amount.
Three, part of the reason more strikes get called now, particularly at the bottom of the zone, is because most teams have actual statistical methods for evaluating pitch framing that couldn't possibly exist prior to PitchF/X. I don't think pitch framing has to be part of the game forever, but since teams have made significant organizational decisions based on pitch framing, I think legislating the value of that skill out of existence needs to be part of a CBA negotiation. The current CBA expires after 2016, so I think a change could be fair at that point, but a whole bunch of teams would cry foul if MLB tries to eliminate human balls and strikes without significant advance warning.
Personally, I think going to computerized balls and strikes would be a net positive, and the only thing I'd really miss is all the interesting pitch-framing research, but I understand why MLB isn't having meaningful public discussion about computerizing the strike zone.
I think people are conflating a couple things. People like good pitching, and people like good defense. People will come to the ballpark to see both. People tend not to come to the ballpark to see good managing. The shift is boring baseball, and even if that is worth three or four wins over the grand scheme of things it's still a net negative for baseball.
I'd wait a few years and see if the trends continue and then, if so, consider lowering the mound slightly rather than outlawing shifts.
I'd wait a few years and see if the trends continue and then, if so, consider lowering the mound slightly rather than outlawing shifts.
I think the reason they're more willing to outlaw the shift is that with rare exceptions it's a pretty novel concept, certainly in its frequency and its extent. Even though the rules would be novel, the phenomenon they're addressing is generally novel too. The mound has been at the same height for more than forty years. Appropriately or not, the mound at the present height is not viewed as a novelty.
National League fans are fucking weird people.
I think people are conflating a couple things. People like good pitching, and people like good defense. People will come to the ballpark to see both. People tend not to come to the ballpark to see good managing. The shift is boring baseball, and even if that is worth three or four wins over the grand scheme of things it's still a net negative for baseball.
The shift is boring baseball in your opinion. I personally like seeing defenses actually try to take a player's spray chart into consideration. The thing I consider to be boring baseball is seeing a batter come to the plate and know that he's unlikely to put the ball in play, and that if he does put the ball in play it's almost certainly going to be hit to a particular side of the field. Allowing shifting favors batters whose swings result in a greater diversity of possible outcomes.
If a batter could successfully beat the shift with even a 40% success rate, the shift is turning that player into the offensive version of Ichiro circa 2004 (actually, probably an even better player than that, considering the change in offensive environments). No defense is going to voluntarily shift on a regular basis against a player who has proven he can beat it at a 40% clip - it may still be useful on a situational basis, but that's it. If Tex, Ryan Howard, etc. are so stuck in their current approach that they're unable or unwilling to try something different, why exactly do we want to change the rules in order to protect them?
I'm not suggesting that bunting against the shift is some super-easy thing that players can just pick up in a day - I'm saying that, just as the defense has the shift as a weapon to use against a severe pull hitter, a severe pull hitter has options at his disposal against an over-shift. Are they super-easy options? Not necessarily, but why does it need to be? And even if we knew for a fact that none of these guys can learn to bunt or make some swing adjustments to hit more to all fields, why exactly is it a problem that defenses position themselves in a way to turn a few more pulled balls into outs? We don't have a significant downward spike in BABIP - BABIP goes down about 30 points on ground balls when the shift is on, but infield shifts are only used for about 10% of batters and doesn't have much of an effect on fly balls either way, so in aggregate we're talking about one or two points of BABIP league-wide.
Legislating the shift out of existence strikes me as a solution that presumes the shift is actually a problem, but I don't see much of a substantive argument besides "I don't like it" or "a few players will be worse until/unless they learn to hit the ball to the other side of the field". It's perfectly fine to not like those things and make an argument against the shift on a strictly aesthetic basis, but framing the shift as a significant contributor to the decline in offense (which I don't necessarily think you're doing) or as an objectively negative aspect of the game is something I don't see any evidence for.
National League fans are fucking weird people.
Try again.
If they are going to outlaw anything it should be all the equipment that has enabled statisticians to change how the game is prepared for and played. That would have a much greater impact.
If they are going to outlaw anything it should be all the equipment that has enabled statisticians to change how the game is prepared for and played. That would have a much greater impact.
In five or six years' time, at least. These changes take time, because they have to start with prospects. This is a generation of hitters for whom power has been the most important skill.
Now it's up to the dead-pull hitters to change their game and be reintroduced to the middle and left center parts of the field...
"Let me get something else out of the way: If you could line up all the hitters in baseball history with all of them at their peak, under the same conditions, against the same pitchers and in the same ball park – would you take Ted over everyone, including Babe Ruth?
Absolutely Ted. You don’t have to make him any allowances for the years he missed in the military to see his greatness, but if you do give him credit for those years, his numbers would be absolutely awesome. Not just the home run totals, and I think he probably would have reached 700, but the points off his batting average by missing those prime seasons.
And not just that. One thing your book made clear to me was the effectiveness of the “Williams shift” – or, as some called it, the Boudreau shift because it was invented by Lou Boudreau — which put most of the players on the right side of the field to counteract that dead-pull hitter’s stroke. Why didn’t he go against it by slapping balls to the opposite field?
Pride. Just silly stubborn pride. He just had to show that he could beat it.
Didn’t he realize that he was playing against the percentages, especially when other teams started using it? That by hitting a ball over third base or down into the corner for a double or something might make them stop using it?
He did realize it, but belatedly, and it cost him points on his batting average."
Now it's up to the dead-pull hitters to change their game and be reintroduced to the middle and left center parts of the field...
Baseball's "market force" is the consumer. Who preferred the long ball (pre and probably post baseball's insufferable recriminations about PEDs) to watching a bunch of 30/100 guys turn into .230 hitters.
Even if we start from the assumption that people want to see more offense, fixing the strike zone will have a significantly stronger effect on league-wide offense than eliminating the shift (which, again, only accounts for one or two points of variation in leaguewide BABIP).
The run environment has gone down seven-tenths of a run (about 3400 runs total) the past decade. Eliminating shifts is only going to give back about 200 runs - the effect would be virtually indistinguishable from noise. If we assume that decreased offense is a problem, shift legislation is not a solution. It's just something for Manfred to point at and proclaim he's doing something to boost offense. The drastic increase in K/BB is the real culprit.
FanGraphs on shifts - ( New Window )
K%-BB% was 12.7% last year. Five years ago it was barely 9 percent. Ten years ago it was 8 percent. In 1993 (the last pre-strike season) it was 6.4 percent. The continued (and accelerating) increase in K%-BB% completely drowns out any BABIP changes. Trying to eliminating shifts in order to combat the decline in offense isn't just interventionist, it's also bringing a knife to a gun fight.
lgBABIP, lgK%-BB%, and lgERA, by year - ( New Window )
If you want more exciting play without making significant changes to the way the game is played, the easiest and most fool-proof way to do that is to shrink the strike zone. Make the pitcher throw the ball over the plate, and you improve quality of contact - you get more home runs, you get more balls hit into the gap, you put more pressure on the defense to make difficult plays, etc. You also fewer strikeouts, more balls in play, more baserunners - all things people want to see. Those effects will apply for all batters and all plate appearances.
And for what the shift does take away in terms of "traditional" great defensive plays (for the small fraction of plays where an overshift actually applies, mind you), it also gives back by creating defensive situations you wouldn't otherwise see - you have different defenders covering different bases, you have infielders negotiating double-play opportunities from different angles, you have shortstops crossing second base in the opposite direction to field a ball before throwing across their body.
At the end of the day, the issue that's causing concern isn't the shift, it's the sharp overall decrease in offensive production. If teams were scoring 4.5 or 4.75 runs per game instead of the 4.08 they scored last year, we would not see Manfred openly pondering whether to eliminate the shift. Fix the strike zone (which isn't hard - grade the umpires on how closely they call the rulebook strikezone, give them financial incentives to call fewer strikes if you have to) and Manfred can add a half-run per team back to the game in a year if he wants to without touching any other rules.
That's fair. I can't object to an aesthetic argument that people don't like the way the shift looks. I personally disagree - I like seeing teams make adjustments, I like seeing hitters try to adjust to the shift, etc. - but I can't say that someone's personal defensive preferences are objectively wrong.
At the same time, any rule change that restricts the positioning of a defensive player other than the pitcher and catcher is a huge change. Even if we start from the position that a rule is necessary (which I obviously disagree with), any rule you institute opens a completely new can of worms. If you say you can have no more than two infielders on each side of second base, how long do they need to stay there - until the ball reaches the plate? until the pitcher begins his motion? How far does a player have to go into the outfield before he is considered an outfielder instead of an infielder? Even if you try to make rules against the shift, teams are going to push up against the rules as far as will be allowed, probably in ways that will look even stranger than a regular overshift.
Fix the strike zone and give the shift a few years to settle in. You'll see fewer and fewer players who are completely incapable of hitting the ball to a particular side of the field, you'll see a greater variety of shifts (especially as teams incorporate StatCast data into their analysis) that will be interesting in and of themselves, you'll see greater fan acceptance of shifting as the media figures out how to present them, etc.
Post-script: I realize that we aren't going to completely agree on this issue since it's largely a matter of differing perspectives, but I appreciate the civil discourse.
The Strike Zone Expansion is Out of Control - ( New Window )
They don't only have to do one - but the reason Manfred openly considered getting rid of the shift (something he's already walked back to a degree) is because of the decreased run environment. That was the exact context in which he volunteered the idea as a possible solution. And eliminating the shift does virtually nothing to accomplish that. The best estimates of the impact the shift has on run production is about 200 runs - six or seven runs per team per game. One run a month. Eliminating shifts does virtually nothing to accomplish the goal the suggestion specifically targets.
If MLB determines that there is significant opposition to shifting for aesthetic reasons and creates a sensible positioning rule (or rules, plural) on that basis, I think that's fine. I like the shift (because I like allowing teams to put defenders wherever the hell they want), but I watched baseball before shifting was a regular part of the game and I'll still watch baseball if shifts go away. But the Commissioner's statement implies that the shift is having a significant effect on offensive production, when the real driver of decreased offensive production is the increased strike zone, which is in turn driven by - wait for it - the league's own standard for grading umpires.
Given the goal, if the Commissioner really wants to accomplish his goal by attacking the shift, he's tilting at windmills - and if a rule is passed, I'm not confident in the league's ability to avoid unintended consequences (see: the last time the league tried to make a rule change: changing - and then un-changing - the section of rule 2.00 governing catches last season).
I like the idea of an electronic strike zone. Seems silly in this day and age that balls and strikes are left to the whim and fancy of the umpire.
Don't let batters step out of the box for so long, maybe don't have unlimited checks on the runner at first, don't let the pitcher and catcher conference on the mound, lotta' other ideas to speed up the game. Baseball is a terrific game - but the games are too long.
And if they really want more runs, how about we go back to the juiced era?