There’s a lot of frustration going around on the Rangers this year. I haven’t been following them closely due to work, but the few game I’ve seen or listened to, I get the impression that they gave up on this season about a month ago.
Well, now that i’ve said that, apparently there are those within the game of baseball who want to make the shift a violation of the actual, written rules of baseball.
This article by Tom Verducci discusses the issue, pointing to a steep decline in batting average among left-handed sluggers, especially those without much speed, as the use of the infield shift has increased in baseball. In particular, the BABIP of these lefties on pulled hits has declined considerably over the past few years.
Verducci cites one major-league hitting coach who wants to outlaw the shift altogether, and says there is growing support for the idea as hitting and run production declines to its lowest level since the introduction of the DH. Verducci discusses the possibility of a rule whereby the shortstop cannot play on the right side of second base; directly behind the base would be as far as he’s allowed to go. Verducci says that “it is time to at least think about” such a rule.
What do you folks think?
That it’s crazy to try to keep teams from adjusting to try to beat the other team.
Next they’ll say you can’t choose which pitches to throw to David Ortiz, either.
Yeah, that’s my general position.
Left-handed hitters have had certain advantages for decades. They start a good yard or so closer to first base than a right-handed hitter, for one thing. If Ichiro Suzuki were right handed, and the same type of hitter, i’ll bet he would have recoded dozens fewer singles over the course of his career.
It seems that if left-handed hitters are being impacted by the shift (I’ve seen some shifts on right-handed hitters. More lately, though very much not common. Yet?), then it’s up to them to adjust. Baseball should be a game about adjusting, not about having the game be static while you romp through it.
Well, to be fair, the nature of the game itself makes it much harder to put any sort of shift on against a right-hander.
First, you can’t shift the first baseman too far, like you can with third base for a left-hander, because you need someone to cover first all the time. You can’t just leave a big hole there like they often do at third for lefties.
Second, when you shift for a leftie, you can put your second baseman way out in a sort of shallow right field position to cut off singles, but you can’t do that for a rightie because the throw to first from shallow left field would then be far too long to make any outs.
This really is a situation where left-handed hitters suffer a disadvantage. As i said, though, i don’t really think we should change the rules.
Right, I know why it’s less common. But I don’t think I have seen an actual three infielders on the left for a RH hitter until this year. I wonder if that will become more common as the stats trickle in.
Oh, those poor left handed hitters. I’m all for outlawing the shift to help them get their minimum daily requirement of hits. I also think that lefty power hitters should get four strikes, and that pitchers should not be allowed to throw fastballs to them in excess of ninety miles an hour. Oh, and a rule that lefty pitchers can’t face lefty batters would be good, thanks!
Learn to take an occasional pitch to left, whether bunted or blooped or lined, and you’ll a) raise that batting average and b) get the opponents to think twice about putting on such an extreme shift.
This just sounds like entitlement on the part of the hitters, and learned helplessness on the part of hitting coaches. The idea that we can’t teach the hitters anything new, even to save their careers, s astonishing to me.
Learn to adjust, dammit!
If you’ve spent your whole life swinging the bat a certain way, developing the muscle memory and timing to the point it’s almost instinctual (as needed at that level), trying to do a total change would be a mess. Not only trying to do something you’ve never done before but wrecking what you’ve built all your life.
And before you talk entitlement, remember the pitcher was upset because the batter had already gotten a hit earlier and therefore wasn’t allowed any more.
Frankly, anyone considering a 2 run lead in the fifth a sure thing is nuts.
He’s not talking about the Colby Lewis incident anymore; he’s arguing against the more general idea that the rules should be changed to disallow the shift.
I’m responding to the Verducci article, not to Lewis. If you look up about ten posts you’ll see my take on Lewis and his whining! It’s fair to say I don’t like entitlement whether it comes from pitchers (you can only get a hit off me if you do it the way I want you to) or from hitters (you can’t put a fielder where I’m likely to hit the ball).
As for muscle memory etc, I understand your point, but it would be a lot more valid an argument if hitters always swung exactly the same way for every pitcher, every situation, every pitch, and of course they don’t do that. Batting against a right handed speedball Pitcher, for most hitters, is very different from batting against a lefty slop thrower. Hitting three and oh is different from hitting oh and two. A slow low ball does not get the same swing as… Well, you get the idea.
I know the differences are not perhaps as pronounced as they used to be, but you can still see the differences with most hitters. I don’t have a lot of sympathy with those who won’t make further adjustments.
I know the shift has really been killing Carlos Santana this year. 2/3 of his ABs come as a leftie, and he’s hitting .183 batting leftie, but his OBP from the left side is a pretty respectable .339, thanks to all the walks he draws.
They’ve basically taken the ground ball base hit away from him.
Actually, for a properly timed swing, no matter what the pitch is, a batter will swing with the mechanics they’ve developed. It’s when they’re fooled that you see the chop, the punch, the lunge, the protect the plate swings. And they’re not very productive if/when contact is made.
A pull hitter has developed his timing and mechanics to meet a pitch a certain way. Asking him to deliberately swing with entirely different mechanics and a deliberate change in timing(trying to punch to the opposite field) is just not an adjustment that can be done on the spur of the moment.
A batter whose whole hitting style is punching the ball to different fields has developed the mechanics and deliberate change in timing has been doing that all his life.
Imagine a pitcher who throws overhand and his manager suddenly demands he throw submarine style.
Watch players foul off pitches sometime, especially with two strikes. This pitch is going to be strike three, but it’s not my pitch, so I reach out and knock it foul. Sure, sometimes it happens because they’re fooled, but often it’s quite deliberate. Are you saying that left-handed pull hitters never do this? because that is not what I have observed over many years of following baseball. Billy Williams of the Cubs, to name one such player from my early years of fandom, was a master at doing this, and had a great deal of power as a left-handed hitter.
If a player can use his regular mechanics to bloop a pitch out of play (“protecting the plate” as the announcers like to call it), then he can certainly use those regular mechanics to send a pitch to left field. If he can’t, then I’d submit that there’s something wrong with the “mechanics he’s developed.”
And note I’m not saying that hitters need to revamp their entire style of hitting. I suspect that if some of these guys hit a ball to left just once every three games or so, that would make a big difference in how defenses played them. Matt Adams of St. Louis has done a certain amount of this quite successfully so far this year, and he’s hitting .320 or so, and I read recently that other teams are shifting on him less often than they did earlier in the season. Not sure why he can do it when no one else can.
And you know, players do things fairly often that go against their general training. Haven’t you ever seen a pitcher drop down and throw from a different arm slot? Some pitchers do it a lot, others less often, but in my experience most pitchers do it at least occasionally, and good for them. Players will do things differently, and CAN do things differently, if they think it will give them an advantage. I’m not sure why that would be untrue in the specific case of left-handed power hitters.
Definitely not time to think about it. Furthermore, that rule would not work. There is no official definition on fielders other than catcher and pitcher, the glove that the first baseman wears and that no fielder other than the catcher can be stationed in foul territory. So you see that guy standing out in left field. He’s my shortstop right now and he’s to the left of second base. In fact already some teams employ a shift where the thirdbaseman moves to the right of second and the shortstop plays on the left side. The only rule I see that could work would be you must station three fielders excluding the pitcher to the left of on on a line through home and second. Logically it should also say three must be to the right as well.
This is a silly argument, because if they DID decide that they wanted to ban the shift, there would be nothing to stop them defining the fielder at the same time.
It’s actually not silly. I don’t see how you could limit specific positions unless you limit them all or write write cumbersome rules.
What I said is about the only way you could do it. State you must have three fielders on or to the left of a line through home and second. You clearly can’t require more than three. Furthermore, watching the twins defense Carlos Satanna tonight (when he did bunt for a single to beat the shift BTW) they had their center fielder in dead center so they might even have been within that three man rule even though they had an extreme infield shift on.
You might alternately be able to restrict how deep an infielder could play (or again say no more than three fielders can play further than 120(?) feet from home plate. But really I think rules like that would be silly.
Tim Lincecum coming in to pitch for the Giants with one out in the bottom of the 14th in Philadelphia.
Unfortunately for him, the Giants scored 4 in the top of the inning, so it’s not a save situation… 
No, it is. He entered with the tying run in the on-deck circle, right? so if he gets them out he gets the save.
I don’t see that it would have to be cumbersome.
First of all, despite your argument about the “official definition” of positions, the fact is that positions are defined every single game by the teams themselves, and by the official scorers. In fact, Rule 10.03 (a) says:
I have never seen a game, either live at the ballpark or on TV, where the fielding position for each player is not listed. You could quite easily make this listing an official part of the rules, the way that batting order is.
So, you could quite easily write a rule saying, for example, that out of the players designated 1B, 2B, 3B, and SS, no more than two of those players can field on either side of second base. Pretty simple, really.
I’m not advocating such a rule—in fact, i’ve already explicitly opposed it in this thread—but if the league decided that they wanted to outlaw the shift, it really wouldn’t be very difficult to do it.