Ben Fredrickson talks about Rob Manfred’s wish to ban the shift. His first point is funny:
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
There is new evidence to introduce to my argument that attempts to prove Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred likes the idea of changing the game of baseball more than he likes the game of baseball.
I don’t think that’s true, but it’s a great opening line. Football tinkers with the rules a lot, because they know the sweet spot for fan interest is 42 points per game. They change things subtlety, however, moving hash marks or changing when a defender can bump a receiver. Baseball can change the ball, or the height of the mound, but other changes effect the fabric of the game in ways fans might not like. Limiting managerial moves with the shift might be one of them.
Fredrickson gets it right here:
The argument for it bemoans sinking batting averages and rising strikeouts. It’s not fun to watch hitters hit into a shift, they say. Well, at least we can agree on something.
What the ban-the-shift crowd ignores are the lack of adjustments hitters have made to try to combat the trend. Defenses no longer worry about opening up swaths of the field to hitters, because hitters continue to reject the invitation to hit (or bunt) into wide-open areas.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
These adjustments take time. The pendulum will swing back when someone wins an MVP hitting against the shift. Bill James like to say in his Baseball Abstracts that every strength hides a weakness. At some point, the weakness of the shift will be exploited. Baseball just needs to wait for it to happen.
I don’t know. All these people saying that the hitters should ‘just hit the ball the other way’… like it’s so easy to do. Why don’t they ‘just hit the ball over the fence’? You see the problem with that argument? If it was so easy to do, they’d already be doing it. If the pitcher is constantly jamming you inside, it’s not easy to hit to the opposite field with any efficiency.
But players *have* made adjustments to try to “just hit the ball over the fence”—they’ve focused on producing launch angles that increase the frequency of home runs. Not to a frequency of 100%, but an increase nonetheless. There are tradeoffs to the adjustment—more strikeouts, maybe, since the bat head is in the strike zone for less time. And pitchers and defenses are making adjustments in response. Maybe hitting the other way is too difficult, but it’s possible that batters have considered the tradeoffs and decided they’d rather swing for the fences than tap grounders the other way.
If they start paying hitters for contact and average, hitters will adjust..it doesn’t seem as if runs scored is much higher than the 80s (except for 87).
Derek Jeter did alright inside outing the ball.
Might be the next moneyball exploitation, high babip + lbs with out the power throughout the lineup. The anti-Rob Deer approach.