Let's shift again

In one of the best scenes in the movie Moneyball, a crusty old scout tells A’s GM Billy Beane, “You can’t build a baseball team with a computer.”  Beane thinks for a moment and then replies, “Adapt or die.”

A lot of GM’s and other baseball people have adapted to Beane’s use of analytics, mostly because you can’t argue with a team having a microscopic payroll winning division titles.  But the anti-analytics people have dug their heels in again, refusing to adapt to one of the more recent uses of Big Data.  They refuse to adapt, so they want the use of defensive shifts to die.

I've talked about this before, but there continues to be a push for eliminating defensive shifts in baseball. The logic goes that fans like offense, defensive shifts reduce offense, therefore they should be eliminated.  Of course, the managers advocating for this usually are those who rely on left handed power hitters for offense, and they are the ones most disadvantaged by the shift.  Hey, I’m losing, so the rules that have stood for 150 years must be changed!

Players have always been free to position themselves where ever they want on the diamond; only the pitcher and catcher are restricted to designated spots.  The defensive shift started back in 1948 as a way of negating the impact of Ted Williams, possibly the greatest hitter of all time (if he hadn’t lost 5 seasons to military service it wouldn’t be debatable).  The shift started 70 years ago, so why is it being debated now?

Because now it’s not just the greatest hitter of all time that pulls everything, it is every left-handed hitter.  Of course, any logical, rational person would simply start hitting the ball in the other direction, and after a while teams would stop putting on a shift.  But these are baseball players and managers, so logic is a rare quality.  They don’t want to hit the ball the other way because a) it’s kinda hard, and b) it isn’t manly.  So they try to beat the shift by hitting the ball “over” the shift for a home run.  Yet, even though they have accepted the shift and don’t take steps to combat it, they still maintain it is hurting offense, which is bad for baseball.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat myself—the shift isn’t hurting offense, failing to adapt to the shift is hurting offense.

Baseball is a little schizophrenic at the present time.  People in the Commissioner’s Office will likely tell you that the two biggest problems in baseball are a) games take too long, and b) there isn’t enough offense.  If there was more offense, games would take longer, so the whole thing is a catch-22.  But anti-shift people are betting that the desire to increase offense will get a perfectly reasonable adjustment based on data banned simply because it is bad for offense.

The fact that defensive shifts diminish offense (something the stats aren’t exactly clear on, but let’s not quibble) is not, by itself, a reason to ban the shift.  Lots of things diminish offense: fielding gloves, the slider, 105 MPH fastballs, declaring a batter out when he gets three strikes.  MLB did fiddle with the offense/defense equilibrium in the late 1960’s when ERAs plummeted, Carl Yazstremski won a batting title hitting .301, and 21% of the games played ended in shutouts.  But MLB didn’t outlaw wholesale defensive strategies, they just tweaked the strike zone and lowered the mound by 5 inches.

If baseball has a problem, it is the mentality that calls for the elimination of defensive shifts; that is the mindset behind all of the “all or nothing” swings batters take even when they have two strikes.  The philosophy of modern baseball was exemplified by the 2018 all-star game, in which 13 of the 14 runs were scored via a record setting 10 home runs.  An increasing percentage of at bats are resolved via “three true outcomes,” namely strikeouts, walks, and home runs. 

To quote another great baseball movie, in Bull Durham catcher Crash Davis told his pitcher, “Strikeouts are boring.  Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls, it’s more democratic.”  Walks are also not terribly interesting, and home runs are only interesting for about five seconds.  What baseball needs is more offense, meaning singles and doubles, long multi-hit rallies leading to crooked numbers on the scoreboard, not more guys taking home run trots.  Other than moving the fences back to match the dimensions of center field in the legendary Polo Grounds (which was nearly 500 feet away from home after 1963) I’m not sure how you fight all the modern swingers who upper cut everything and who find no shame in striking out (Joe DiMaggio once struck out 14 times in a season; Aaron Judge once struck out 8 times in one day). 

Maybe if we made players do something humiliating after striking out, they’d concentrate more on making contact.  Thanks to defensive shifts all they have to do is make contact for a sure base hit, yet they prefer to swing for the fences.  People have been predicting the downfall of baseball for over 100 years, but a game that focuses entirely on strikeouts and homers might just be what is needed to kill the sport.