This is how you apologize

We live in a culture where, as The X-Files once said, “Apology is policy.”  No one seems to behave properly because it is too easy to enjoy being bad and apologize later. 

After playing in the MLB All-Star Game Milwaukee Brewer pitcher Josh Hader had to apologize for racist and homophobic tweets he made when he was 17. It helped that a couple of his non-white teammates stood up for him, but he had to fall on the old excuse that the tweets were made when he “was a child.”  Okay, technically 17 is not old enough to vote, drink, or buy cigarettes, but it’s not like he was randomly typing letters and happened upon the combination, “I hate gay people,” something he not only believed but felt was important enough to share with the world on twitter.  As apologies go it’s not perfect, but better than most apologies from athletes.  MLB sentenced him to complete sensitivity training, which seems a little late given the tweets were done seven years ago, but those things are so boring it will discourage him from saying those things again (at least on Twitter).

Another person doing some apologizing was James Gunn, the author of the two Guardians of the Galaxy movies, who was fired  from the third chapter after some inappropriate tweets surfaced. If you go to the linked article and read his apology in full, you should come to one conclusion; this is the gold standard of apologies. No self-indulgent explanation of why he made the tweets, other than he was an idiot.  No “I’m sorry if anyone was offended,” which makes it sound like the problem lies with the offendee, not the offender.  No, “This happened a long time ago and I’ve learned my lesson so let’s put it all behind us, can I have my money now?”  Gunn says what he did was wrong, takes full responsibility, and accepts the consequence that he loses a lucrative, high prestige job doing something he is very good at. 

A good apology is a rarity.  So many people try to use the message to justify their actions, or make it seem like they are the put-upon party.  Some people seem to be saying “Sorry I wasn’t PC when I called that [fill in the slur] a [fill in the slur].”  My all-time favorite is when an athlete calls someone a homophobic slur, and explains by saying it was a joke, he didn’t mean it literally.  Yes, because saying a man had sex with other men would be a huge insult, and you would never say that about another man except in jest. 

Gunn’s apology is such that I hope he gets a chance to be forgiven and to work on movies, maybe even Guardians of the Galaxy 3.  There are some actions for which no apology can ever be adequate, but there are some where forgiveness is appropriate.  Maybe he’s a lying scumbag who regrets nothing, but he certainly sounds sincere.

I wish I had more to say on the subject, but that’s it.

Sorry.

soccer is dying in America; viva la baseball

The data is in and the result is inescapable: soccer participation is rapidly declining in America.  What’s that, you say?  There must be some mistake!  Soccer is the fastest growing sport in America!  More kids play soccer than baseball, which is dying out!  Soccer is far safer than football, which is losing participants because of concussion fears! 

Wrong, wrong, and , um, wrong.  According to a thoroughly researched article in that bastion of good journalism, the New York Times, youth soccer participation has fallen significantly in the good old U.S. of A.  Over the past three years the percentage of 6-12 year olds playing soccer on a regular basis has dropped by 2.3 million players, or nearly 14%.  The problem, according to the article, is cost.

This is ironic, as one reason why people have long predicted that soccer would supplant baseball as a youth activity was that baseball required expensive equipment while soccer needed just a ball and a couple of goalposts.  Apparently leagues such as the American youth Soccer Organization (AYSO) charge $190 for kids to compete in a 16-game season.  Given that all that’s needed is a ball and some goalposts, that’s a lot of overhead.  Hope Solo, the goalkeeper on the US 2015 World Cup champion (women’s) soccer team, was quoted as saying her family would not be able to afford to support her soccer playing if she were a kid today.

If cost is an impediment to kids playing baseball and developing into professional players, then how has it been possible for San Pedro de Macoris, a city in the Dominican Republic that in no way resembles Beverley Hills, to produce 76 major league players and earn the nickname “The Cradle of Shortstops”?  As someone who spent many summer days playing baseball with odd-sized bats, a rubber ball, and only half of us wearing gloves, kids will find a way (when prices aren’t jacked up by adults).

There is also the issue of placing too much pressure on players when they are too young.  Players in other countries have numerous options when playing competitive soccer; no such infrastructure exists in America, where young players must either make prestige traveling teams or play pick-up games in the park.  Imagine the pressure if a young baseball player wanted to be in the major leagues, but there were no college teams, or AAA, AA, or A minor league clubs.  Talented players are being weeded out before their talents have the chance to manifest themselves.

The methods by which future soccer superstars are identified is the subject of the book The Away Game by Sebastian Abbot, which raises these concerns.  A book review in The Atlantic compares that book on women’s soccer (Under the Lights and in the Dark, by Gewndolyn Okenham), and points out that girls' soccer has a better system of developing talent than boys' soccer.  Maybe that explains why the American women’s soccer team has won the World Cup while the pathetic men’s team was eliminated from this year’s World Cup by losing to Trinidad and Tobago, a nation with the population of Dallas, Texas.

The development of youth soccer should be taking on a certain urgency in the United States, given that we are co-hosting the World Cup in 2026.  Given that the field will be expanded from 32 to 48 teams, and that the host country is traditionally given a bye into the proceedings, we should at least avoid the humiliation of not even playing on our home turf.  But what are the prospects that the United States can go from a country incapable of beating Trinidad & Tobago in a preliminary round to one that can credibly challenge France, England, Brazil, Belgium, Croatia, and Germany for the championship in eight short years?  The answer is, of course, “None whatsoever,” especially if kids continue to abandon youth soccer in droves, as they are doing now.

But let’s look on the bright side—there’s always women’s soccer, where we have some of the world’s best players and a winning tradition.  Let the boys play baseball; we won the World Baseball Classic in 2017, and our odds of winning the next one are slightly better than the odds of our men’s team winning the World Cup in the next 50 years.

Scarlett Johansson and who's playing who

After a storm of protest (okay, maybe just a squall; it’s hard to quantify these things) Scarlett Johansson has dropped out of the movie Rub & Tug where she would have played a trans man.  She had previously dismissed criticism by citing three award-nominated performances of cis actors playing trans characters, but the fact that she had been criticized for previously starring as a “whitewashed” Asian character in Ghost in the Shell apparently added enough fuel to the fire to get her to back out.

I’ve written before on this subject, and as I said before, I don’t think you can draw bright lines as to what is “right” and “wrong.”  The three actors Johansson cites, Jeffery Tambor in Transparent, Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club, and Felicity Huffman in Transamerica, are examples of excellent actors playing roles different from their everyday existence with sensitivity and integrity.  This is fundamentally different from a buck-toothed Mickey Rooney playing an Asian stereotype in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which was offensive to both Asians and those who appreciate good acting.

You can point to hundreds of examples of movies and television shows (particularly in the past when there were fewer minority actors) of egregious casting decisions when anyone with dark hair could play someone Hispanic or Native-American.  And if those roles had been filled by race-appropriate actors, Hollywood would have been a more diverse place then and now.

But I can’t condemn instances like German actor Peter Lorre playing the Japanese character Mr. Moto in a series of films in the 1930’s.  Lorre was a brilliant actor who portrayed the character not as a stereotype, but as a three dimensional person who was intelligence and fought for justice.  Add to the fact that there were almost no Asian actors available at the time, and that attitudes towards the Japanese in pre-World War II America weren’t positive (subsequently Pearl Harbor didn’t help matters), I would argue that Lorre’s performance enhanced diverse attitudes rather than impeded them.

With relatively small films like Rub & Tug, landing a name star is possibly critical to getting funding.  Now that Johannsen has dropped out, will the film get made?  Is there a trans star with as much star recognition as the actress who plays Black Widow in the Marvel Universe (and will soon have her own stand-alone film)?  I don’t think so.  If only a trans actor can play a trans man, can trans actors complain that they don’t get cast in cis roles?

Let’s apply this to the controversy over the character of Apu in The Simpsons.  The Simpson’s showrunner has said he doesn't have a problem with the way the show has handled Apu, but the voice actor who plays Apu has said that maybe they should recast the role with an Indian actor.  But what has helped the The Simpsons survive for 30 years is the fact that their cast of actors includes three suburb voice artists (Dan Castellaneta, Hank Azaria and Harry Shears) who are capable of playing multiple accents and dialects. If they have to hire an actor with an Indian background to play Apu, do they have to hire someone from Scotland to play Groundskeeper Willie?  A Jewish actor for Krusty the Clown?  An Hispanic actor to play Bumblebee man?  A gay actor to play Wayland Smithers?  Their cast is going to have to get much, much larger if each character is entitled to its own ethno-socio-sexualogical cast member.

Where do you draw the line?  Is a white voice actor playing a stereotypical Indian character bad, but the same actor playing a stereotypical Scottish character okay?  Is it okay to cast an actor of Korean descent as a Japanese character in Star Trek (John Cho playing Hikaru Sulu), which was blessed by George Takei, the Japanese actor who played Sulu on TV and in previous films?  Can a Native-American actor from one tribe play a Native American character from a different tribe?  Can someone from Michigan play a character from Texas, or someone from England play a Frenchman (Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau)?

It is the nature of actors to want to stretch, to play characters as different from themselves as possible.  It may be a mistake when Marlon Brando wants to play an Asian in Teahouse of the August Moon, or for Johnny Depp to play Tonto in The Lone Ranger.  But it can be amusing, as when Alec Guiness played both male and female members of a royal family in Kind Hearts and Coronets.  American actress Linda Hunt played a Chinese-Australian man in The Year of Living Dangerously and won an Oscar; Robert Downey Jr. played an Australian actor playing an African-American character in Tropic Thunder and got an Oscar nomination. 

On the one hand, we shouldn’t put people in boxes; on the other, putting people in boxes sometimes serves a purpose.  Increasingly there are questions about what constitutes a “box,” what elements a part of someone’s identity.  Color-blind casting sounds like a good model until there is a multi-race production of A Raisin in the Sun.  What constitutes an element of a character’s identity that must be shared by the actor playing them—their race, their nationality, their gender, their left- or right-handedness?  I don’t think the answer is black and white.

RIP Ghosted

Ghosted, the Fox comedy that was mostly a parody of the slightly more successful Fox show The X-Files, has been cancelled.  But the network, in its wisdom, is showing the remaining episodes.  Why?  Either they want to provide closure to the, um, dozens of fans of the show, or it’s summer or there is nothing but crap on anyway.  Frankly, the episodes that have aired since the show was rebooted have increasingly demonstrated that the attempt to transform the show from an X-Files spoof to a workplace comedy were doomed from the start.

For the millions of you who have never watched Ghosted, it was about a pair of investigators who looked into paranormal activity, just like Mulder and Scully on that other show.  Unlike Mulder and Scully, one was not a porn-obsessed nerd and the other was not a hot, brilliant woman doctor; one (Craig Robinson) was a former LAPD officer with some emotional baggage, while the other (Adam Scott) was a brilliant Stanford astrophysicist whose belief in the paranormal took over his life after his wife left him (or was abducted by aliens).  The two are recruited by a clandestine government agency called Bureau Underground (I am glad they didn’t go with some awkward “Agents of SHIELD” type acronym) that investigates the paranormal because, it was later revealed, Harry Truman had a ghost cat in the White House.

The show's weakness, at first, was an over-reliance on the inestimable charms of Robinson and Scott (hey, I just realized those were the names of the Bill Cosby/ Robert Culp characters on I Spy!).  The show didn’t put a lot of effort into the plots or the supporting characters, but instead seemed content to put the two leads in weird situations and then let them riff their way out of it.  After it had been on for a month Fox announced it was ordering more episodes, but they were replacing the showrunner with Paul Lieberstein, who had been on the American version of The Office and who would presumably transform it into more of a workplace comedy.

The show went on hiatus after December and returned in June with the rebooted format.  The first three episodes took place almost entirely in the Bureau’s office, and most of the tertiary cast members were finally given character names.  The secondary cast was also given more to do, especially boss Ava Lafrey, played by Ally Walker who proved to have unexplored comic chops.  But the whole thing came across as just another version of The Office, only weirder, and the show was cancelled.

Changing the format of a show in mid-stream almost never works.  Scrubs tried to transition to Scrubs: Med School and lasted 13 episodes.  Burke’s Law, a 60’s police mystery-drama starring Gene Barry, didn’t succeed when it switched its format (and title) to Amos Burke: Secret Agent (possibly because no one took a secret agent named "Amos" seriously).  The only show I can think of that successfully changed its format after a problematic start was Cougar Town, which began as a high-concept star vehicle for Courtney Cox and successfully transitioned into a low-concept ensemble comedy.   Shows can get better; for example, Angel started off fairly mediocre but got better with each successive season.  But tossing out the initial premise and starting over rarely works.

The shift in format has raised some uncomfortable questions with character continuity.  One of the running bits in the original format was that Scott’s character, Max Jennifer, was attracted to co-worker Annie (Amber Stevens West), but was hesitant to ask her out because of some baggage regarding his ex-wife.  However, the new showrunner must have decided not to go in that direction, and in the most recent episode the whole idea of Max and Annie getting together is killed by 1) Robinson’s character telling Max that he slept with Annie after a party several weeks earlier, and 2) Annie telling Max that she didn’t want to go out with him and that she never flirted with him in the first place.

Okay, if the new showrunner wanted to put the kibosh on a Max/Annie hook-up, that’s fine.  But doing it this way raises all sort of awkward questions. First, it makes Max look like the poster boy for the #MeToo movement when we are supposed to consider him the most relatable character on the show.  Second, we (the audience) saw Annie flirt with Max, so she comes off as a woman who flirts with men then yells “#MeToo” when the guy follows up on her flirting.  Third, it turns Robinson’s character into a guy who’ll have a one-night stand with an inebriated co-worker he otherwise has no interest in, which doesn’t make him look good.  Further, the fact that he insists on telling Max about the, uh, sleepover makes it look like he is more considerate of Max’s feelings than Annie’s, who probably didn’t want the incident related to anyone in the office, particularly a man she flirted with (except she didn’t).  Also, in true sitcom fashion the information was stupidly spread to everyone in the office, making the two men look even more insensitive. 

But Rest in Peace to Ghosted, a sort-of-clever idea that no one apparently knew what to do with.  The show had two well-utilized stars, some under-utilized supporting actors, but needed better writers to make it all work.  Of course, what television show doesn’t need better writers?

LeBron and Superteams

King James has spoken from the top of the mountain, announcing that he is taking his talents to Los Angeles (although he has abandoned the verbiage he used when making prior relocation announcements).  He wants to go to a team with a tradition of winning, so he has joined a team that over the past five years has amassed a winning percentage of .307 and didn’t make the playoffs.  This is like when he announced where he was going when he left Miami and some people (mostly New Yorkers) speculated that he might go to a team where he could win a championship like the NY Knicks (who had last won a title in 1973).  Okay, this is unfair; the Los Angeles Lakers suck now, but they were good way back in the 20^th century.

The most surprising thing is that he made the announcement without waiting to see if the Lakers would snag another big name free agent to co-star in his next title run.  Most of the coverage of LeBron’s future was connected to the possibility of teaming up with other NBA superstars to form a “superteam.”  However bad the Lakers were in 2017-18, the addition of LeBron and one other superstar would immediately assure them a playoffs berth, and even possibly challenge the Warriors for Supremacy in the Western Conference (but this was before the Warriors acquired Boogie Cousins and became even more, um, super-er).

This is where basketball is different than baseball or football; merely signing LeBron would make the worst team in the league a contender for their conference finals.  There is no baseball or football player who alone could have that impact on a team.  Free agency has now wrought this system where players can get together and decide where they want to team up, and with the dominance of the Warriors over the past four years it would take a superteam of at least three superstars to contend.  LeBron, Kevin Love, and three guys chosen at random from the audience (which is the rotation the Cavaliers essentially used during the 2018 playoffs) just won’t cut it.

But what all this manipulation by the players amounts to is that no team will be able to have any chance of winning in the NBA unless they assemble a rival superteam, and the number of cities that can attract a superteam is very small.  From now until doomsday, teams located is such garden spots as Sacramento, Portland, Salt Lake City, Indianapolis, Denver, Memphis, or Orlando (to name only a few) will have absolutely ZERO chance of winning an NBA championship (especially Sacramento, given that it is a well-known fact that the NBA fixed the 2002 Western Conference Finals to make sure that the Lakers, and not the Kings, went to the NBA Finals). 

In other words, three fourths of the NBA will exist only because the other 25% of the teams need someone to lose to them.

The NBA has always been this way; between 1980 and 2010 only 6 teams won 28 of the 30 NBA championships.  But at least in the “old days” a team had the hope that a good draft could bring an emerging star who would immediately elevate his team’s quality.  The problem was that good college players were joining bad NBA teams, but there was a chance.

Unfortunately, now almost all college basketball players are “one and done” and enter the NBA as a callow 19-year-old, with just one season of college ball under their belt.  They tend to be undersized and inexperienced, and not capable of providing a significant impact for at least a few years.  The draft doesn’t level the playing field like it used to.

There are exceptions, like in Philadelphia which implemented “the Process” which called for tanking over several seasons to amass multiple high draft picks and now are favored to vie for the Eastern Conference title in 2018-19.  But this required a half-decade of squalid basketball, fortuitous ping pong ball drops, and a series of quality choices in the draft, all of which cannot be relied upon by another team seeking to emulate their success.

Teams that have a legacy of winning tend to keep it until years after the fact. Maybe successful teams in boring places, like Cleveland, San Antonio and Oklahoma City, will be able to contend for a while by attracting stars to a successful system.  But at some point, the geographic advantage of being in a big city with a pleasant climate, like LA or Miami, will lure the majority of superstars there to form superteams, and from that point on the majority of NBA teams will just be cannon fodder. 

Michele Roberts, the head of the NBA Players’ Association, said that the players should be faulted for competitive imbalance, that it is a factor of some teams being better managed than others.  That assumes that Lebron James seriously sat down and considered signing with the Sacramento Kings, but chose the Lakers not because of money (the salary cap means he’d get the same amount anywhere) but because the prospect of playing with Lonzo Ball appealed to him.  I tend to support player unions, but she’s off her rocker if she doesn’t get that players getting together and “colluding” to go to attractive destinations together is not making rich teams rich and relegating teams in smaller markets to perpetual oblivion.

What’s the solution?  Normally I would oppose anything that restricts player movement, as that helps owners sign players for below-market salaries.  At least it has in baseball, but the economics of the NBA are such that players like Ian Mahinmi can make $16 million in 2017 for playing 15 minutes and scoring under 5 points per game.  Sacramento, Portland and Indianapolis will never be able to compete with LA as an attractive destination for young, wealthy, athletic young men, but there should be some way to stop all of the talent in the league from flowing to a half-dozen teams while preserving salaries and giving the rest of the league a modicum of hope. 

In Memoriam: Harlan Ellison

In Memoriam: Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison was the greatest writer I ever read.

I’m not sure if that is literally true.  I’ve read some great writers; Shakespeare, Twain, and Hemingway to name a few.  But Ellison was the only one who, after I read his work, made me say to myself, “If that’s writing, then I can’t write.”

Ellison died today at age 84.  He reportedly went peaceably, so it was possibly the first time he did anything that way.  He was notoriously combative, litigious, and confrontational.  He wrote what is arguably the best Star Trek episode of all time, City on the Edge of Forever, and then bickered with show creator Gene Roddenberry for decades.  The broadcast version of the show won a Hugo award (one of nine for Ellison); the original script won Ellison a Writer’s Guild award.  So, let’s call it a tie.

Harlan Ellison would be better known except for two things: he worked primarily in genre (science fiction, horror and mystery), and he worked primarily in short fiction, rarely going over novella length.  His short story The Whimper of Whipped Dogs, a fictionalization of the famous Kitty Genovese murder case which won the Edgar Award for best short story, is a classic.  His science fiction novella called A Boy and His Dog was turned into a moderately successful movie starring a young Don Johnson.  But most of his work was so invested in his singular imagination that it was utterly unfilmable, and most of his work is not familiar to mass audiences.

Take, for example, The Deathbird, a Hugo-award winning short story that interweaves segments about a dying planet, a son being asked to euthanize his mother, an essay about Ellison's dog dying, and a written exam being given for purposes that are not clear.  There is no clear plot line, few characters, and a narrative that shifts gears about a dozen times in 29 pages, but together it conveys something profound about death, dealing with death, what it means to go on, and also to not continue.

Much of his stuff was dark, but he had a sharp sense of humor.  His three-part essay “The three most important things in life: sex, violence and labor relations” is probably the funniest thing I’ve ever read.  Part one describes a date he had with a young woman when he was a struggling writer in Hollywood that went terribly wrong; part two is about a close encounter with death in a Times Square movie theater balcony; and part three is about his infamous tenure as a contract writer for Disney that lasted almost one entire day (Roy Disney overheard him telling other writers that he had an idea for a porno movie featuring Mickey Mouse and Tinkerbell and did not appreciate it).

He wrote a lot of cerebral stuff, but he also wrote for television (the ironic juxtaposition would not be lost on him).  He wrote two episodes for Outer Limits, called Soldier and Demon with a Glass Hand, that are not only classics, but also allowed him to successfully sue James Cameron for plagiarism when The Terminator came out (frankly, I don’t see any similarities other than time travel and robots, but whatever).  He wrote for several TV series in the 1960, most notably the aforementioned Star Trek episode whose lore is almost as famous as the episode itself.

The plot, for the unfamiliar, sends Kirk and Spock back in time to repair damage to the timeline that wiped out existence as they knew it.  They arrive in 1930’s New York and meet a social worker named Edith Keeler, played by Joan Collins.  Kirk falls in love with her (because, well, she’s Joan Collins) but then must make a choice when she appears to be the item in the timeline that caused the change.

Ellison’s script was a spec script, with no regular characters named because they hadn’t been created when Roddenberry asked for the script.  In Ellison’s version, the Chief Engineer of the Enterprise was responsible for distributing an illegal narcotic that precipitated the events leading to the change in the timeline.  Network standards wouldn’t accept a script with illegal drug use, and it was changed to an accidental overdose of a prescribed drug.  Ellison complained, loudly, about this and other changes; when Star Trek conventions became a thing, Roddenberry loved to tell audiences that Ellison’s version had “Scotty dealing drugs.”  Ellison again complained loudly, and Roddenberry promised never to say that again, a promise he broke at the next Star Trek convention.  It was too good of a line.

Ellison didn’t write much for TV after the 1960’s, but he was a consultant on the Twilight Zone revival in the 1980’s (Bruce Willis was in an effective dramatization of Ellison’s short story “Shatterday”) and Babylon 5 in the 1990’s.  He created a series called The Starlost but became so enraged at the producers that he demanded that his name not be put on the series, which was attributed to his pen name, Cordwainer Bird. 

An entertaining documentary was made about him in 2008 called “Dreams with Sharp Teeth.”  He also edited the groundbreaking anthologies Dangerous Visions and Again Dangerous Visions that pushed the boundaries of what themes science fiction could tackle, from sexuality to drug use to violence.  He also won numerous awards for a short story titled "Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54' N, Longitude 77° 00' 13" W," which may be the longest short story title I’ve seen.

A lot of what he wrote, especially his essays, displayed a seemingly inexhaustible supply of anger.  That's okay.  To spew vitriol indiscriminately requires almost no talent; to vent one's spleen with humor, intelligence and style is genius.  Jon Stewart on The Daily Show could do it; critic Robert Hughes was a master; Harlan Ellison was the Grand High Lord of the Realm.  

Ellison won 9 Hugo awards, 4 Nebulas (including being the only writer to win three times in the short story category), two Edgar Awards for mystery short stories, four Writers Guild Awards for TV scripts, and a bunch of other awards. 

So long to Harlan Ellison.  I wish him an afterlife more pleasant that most of those he imagined in his stories.

Don't ban the defensive shift

Bill Veeck, the great, iconoclastic owner of a number of major league teams, once said, “Baseball must be a great sport; the owners haven’t killed it yet.”  Professional baseball has survived for 149 years, outliving the deadball era, the Black Sox scandal, the Great Depression, the powerball period of the 1950’s, the pitcher-dominated 1960’s, and the steroid era of the 1990’s.  But I still get nervous when I hear the owners want to improve on perfection.

The latest is a desire to outlaw the latest attack on baseball orthodoxy, namely the defensive shift.  The shift is a relatively new invention, arising in the late 1940’s (baseball is a game ruled by traditionalists, so change rarely happens quickly).  It was invented in 1946 by Cleveland Indians shortstop/manager Lou Boudreau, himself a Hall of Famer, to challenge another future Hall of Famer, the great Ted Williams. It was Boudreau who first put three infielders on the second base side of the diamond  in an effort to discourage left-handed pull hitters from swinging naturally.  What was once an obscure tactic suddenly gained credibility in the 21^st century, and suddenly this defense is being credited for destroying the game of baseball.

It isn’t entirely clear that the shift is actually effective, although there is some evidence to support it.  And the people who despise it, like Yankee manager Joe Girardi, are who you’d expect to complain—people who make their living off of slow footed left handed power hitters (Girardi probably wants all pitches other than 82 MPH fastballs outlawed as well).  Of course players like Ryan Howard, whose career was ended by the shift, hate the strategy the same way that 7 foot tall basketball players hate the 3-point shot and slow defensive linemen hate mobile quarterbacks. 

But, as the commercials used to say, chicks dig the long ball, and MLB is listening.  According to reports MLB is considering trying to improve offense by banning defensive shifts and implementing the DH in both leagues.  One irony in this is that MLB worries about length of play, but increasing offense makes games last longer.  A Sandy Koufax/Bob Gibson duel back in the 1960’s would be over in two hours, tops. 

Someone of ESPN’s Around the Horn said that the defensive shift was causing offensive production to go down.  That is precisely wrong—not adapting to the shift is responsible for any drop in production.  As Hall of Famer Wee Willie Keeler advised players over 100 years ago, the secret of batting is to “hit ‘em where they ain’t.”  When there is only one fielder to the left of second base, and no one within 50 feet of the third base line, just hit the ball to that side of the infield.  Heck, anyone with any speed could turn a bunt down the third base line into a double.

Defensive shifts do not create an unfair advantage, as any increase in defensive coverage on one side of the field is equaled by creating a defensive liability on the other side of the field.  If you want to increase offense by eliminating an unfair advantage, then outlaw the 100 MPH fastball.  Hey, there are too many strikeouts, so let’s make it four strikes and you’re out at the old ball game.  Remember that proposal to have a runner start on second base in extra innings?  Why not start EVERY inning with a man on second?

One way to improve offenses would be to have better players.  In 1941 Joe DiMaggio struck out 13 times in 139 games; Aaron Judge strikes out that many times on a typical weekend.  Of course Joltin’ Joe was a better ballplayer that Aaron Judge, but with that many strikeouts you wonder if Judge is even trying to make contact with the pitch, or is he just closing his eyes and swinging as hard as possible?

Or you could shorten the base paths to under 90 feet.  Or maybe go back to the time when batters could tell the pitcher where they would prefer to have the ball thrown to them.  There are a lot of ways to increase offense (one could, hypothetically, tamper with baseballs to reduce their drag coefficient and fly further).  But any change in the rules meddles with the balance of a game that has been appreciated for nearly 150 years.  Sometimes intervention is needed; the dominance of pitching in 1968 needed to be dealt with.  But given time any innovation that threatens the game will eventually be met with techniques to counteract them.

So don’t ban the infield shift.  A better idea would be to limit teams to using four pitchers per nine inning game.  That would improve offenses and speed up pace of play.  But instead of banning the shift, make batters learn how to bunt.