I’m not sure why these rule changes would drive fans away. The clocks will rarely come up in enforcement and by May you’ll forget they exist.
Baseball is ALREADY putting out the least fun version of the game we’ve seen since the 1950s, if not ever. There is less action than ever in longer games than ever. It has to be improved.
In no way is this comparable to hitting a major league fastball. It’s not remotely analogous.
Changing HOW YOU HIT is not something you do at bat to at bat. Hitting in baseball is memorization and repetition. If a ballplayer alters their stance or mechanics to hit the odd single the other way it could totally ruin their swing. On top of that, teams when they shift do so while having their pitcher pitch in certain ways; if they’re shifting a lefthanded batter they don’t then put plump, easily hit changeups on the outer half that are easily hit away from the shift.
Every team in baseball, every single one, is actively trying to find ways to beat shifts. All of them. The reason they don’t beat shifts every time up is that it is very hard to do so.
Even basketball players have certain parts of the court they’re better at shooting from.
Cricket may be the closest analogy and even there, fielders are generally positioned to a favored side for each batter, rather than symmetrically. It’s not a trivial thing at all to consistently be able to hit a ball with a bat to any part of the field, especially against a skilled bowler.
Two hours seems really quick. So far as I can tell in the 70s, the average was firmly around the 2:30 mark. You have to go back to the 40s to get an average game lasting 2 hours. The average was pretty steady from the late 50s to the 80s at about 2:30, before it really took off to the three plus hour games we get now.
By the way – why is the shift so much a problem? I don’t have any issue with it. Hit it where they ain’t.
Agreed. The pitch clock seems a necessary change if you want to improve the watchability of games. Banning the shift doesn’t seem as necessary. But, I can see why it’s being done.
The NFL has also made changes over recent years to make their game more offense-friendly. Fans generally like to see more scoring.
As noted above, hitting the other way is apparently not as easy as it might seem. As the shift has been so widely used in the past few years, if it were possible for most hitters to effectively hit to the opposite field (i.e., the side of the infield with only one fielder in it), I have to believe that they would have been doing so by now.
The shift effectively takes away the ground ball base hit (by making it much harder to hit the ball in between infielders), and so, the primary strategy that is used by hitters to combat the shift is to hit the ball in the air, in hopes of a home run or a fly ball that drops in between outfielders.
I would really argue against the claim that banning shifts is a “fundamental” change. Shifts have been around a long time, sure. But they haven’t infested the game until recently.
Now, I don’t think banning them is going to have quite the effect Manfred wants. It rewards Joey Gallo and punishes Jeff McNeil in a time when we (baseball fans) seem to be asking for more balls in play, not just extreme pull flyball hitters. It’s nice that it incentivizes better defense up the middle, so we’ll see how that equalizes.
As for throws to first, how fundamental or prevalent is throwing over more than twice in baseball currently? It seems to be far more of a stalling tactic than anything.
Yeah, it hasn’t been two hours in a long time. The difference between 2:30 and 3:00 is huge, though, especially when you’re seeing fewer balls hit into play. The average American League game has about 7.5 fewer balls hit into play now than 40 years ago, 95% of the difference being strikeouts.
It would be VERY good to reduce strikeouts, but that is a somewhat tougher nut to crack. Fortunately it’s not getting worse - strikeouts are down about half a strikeout per game per team from the 2021 peak - but they’re still astoundingly high.
This is, vbasicvally, the theory; the idea is that if you eliminate the shift you slightly increase batting average. Currently, MLB batting averages are at very low levels; the MLB batting average is now .243, the lowest since 1968, and that’s despite the fact pitchers don’t hit anymore.
In my opinion, the most exciting and entertaining form of baseball was the sort played from roughly 1975, when AL offensive levels more or less got back to normal from a long funk, and the steroid era, when we started seeing home runs take over to a ridiculous extent. Not every year - it’s funny how these things can change in one year then change again - but overall. The reason I say that is because it was a remarkably VARIED kind of baseball - you could see almost everything. Some guys hit homers, some guys were contact hitters who amassed high batting averages, and some guys stole huge numbers of bases. You had starting pitchers who completed lots of games, and you had relief aces who piled up saves. You had some managers who played small ball and some managers who preferred three run homers. Teams platooned a LOT, far more than they do now. The only strategy that was significantly underemployed was, actually, defensive shifts. It was essentially never done, even against guys who pulled the ball every time up.
In other words, it was really cool. There was an ongoing contest of different approaches to playing baseball.
Isn’t the traditional placement of the shortstop a “shift” in a way, designed to place an infielder where right handed batter are likely to hit? The modern shift is just treating left handed batters the same. Maybe we should eliminate the shortstop and mandate four outfielders. That would change the batters’ approach.
Traditionally, a .300 batting average has been considered the gold standard for a quality hitter. Currently, there are only 14 players in MLB (8 in the AL, 6 in the NL) who are hitting .300 or above, and the leading batter in MLB as a whole, Paul Goldschmidt, is hitting all of .328.
This essentially recreates the shift. The 4th outfielder is going to play extremely close to the infield on the grass (which the shift ban prohibits), on whichever side of the infield he wants (also banned). Are you now going to invent an arbitrary distance from home outfielders must stand?
I think the evolution from here is having the weak side outfielder shift behind 2nd in the OF.
Bunting is also a lost art these days; advanced statistical analysis has largely killed the sacrifice bunt as a strategy (even more so now that pitchers don’t hit), and so, few batters spend significant practice time on bunting.
Particularly over the past five years or so, batters are coached on their “launch angle,” to hit the ball in the air (ideally at 25 to 35 degrees above horizontal).
I mean I do know that — I wish a bit more small ball and basestealing would come back to the game, but I guess that doesn’t sell. I was watching a highlight reel of Ricky Henderson the other day and was yearning for those days.
It’s not so much that it doesn’t sell as that it doesn’t win games - quite the opposite.
The problem is probably the baseball wasn’t all that well designed to begin with but teams only recently figured out how to play it “right”, i.e. something approaching the optimal way to win. So, we’re trying to legislate it to something a bit more “fun” for the fans, because the way to win under the current rules is boring as hell to watch.
I think what’s being lost here is the increase in batted balls that the pitch clock is going to have. The big arms in today’s game are taking MUCH longer than 14 seconds to get rid of the ball. They’re going to be dropping a couple ticks on their fastballs because the between-pitch recovery is going to be severely reduced (if it’s enforced).
I’m all for the pitch clock. I’ve seen several minor league games which used it, and never once was a pitcher or batter penalized. Players adjusted rapidly.
It’s a moot point now, but defensive shifts didn’t bother me. If batters refuse to put the ball in play safely any way they can, it’s on them. Sometimes it’s a matter of pride.
I started watching baseball in the late 40s and I don’t recall any defensive shifts from then. There was a lot of small ball (the most interesting kind, IMO) and games probably averaged about 2:15, but games under 2 hours were not uncommon. I don’t mind the new rules, but I would love to see automated ball & strike calling. I regularly see balls two inches off the plate called strikes and nothing would be better for batting averages than forcing pitchers to actually throw strikes. (Incidentally, I recently went to a game in Seattle in which the first 34 pitches thrown by the Mariners starter were strikes, an all-time MLB record.) But you know what the biggest change is? When a pitcher started a game in the 1940s, he was expected to finish it. The announcers would always preach how the pitcher had to learn to pace himself. Then along came dedicated relievers like Jim Konstanty who pitched in half of the Phillies games in their pennant-winning 1950 season and the game started changing, not for the better. I don’t see how any rule change can get around that. No reliever before the 8th inning? Ain’t gonna fly.
Off-topic, I want to rant a bit about the rule for winning pitcher. Last night the Jays starter pitched 7 good innings and left with a 3-2 lead. The relief pitcher allowed the Rangers to tie in the 8th. The Jays scored a run in the 9th and the Jays closer closed. Who got credited with the win? The reliever who allowed the tying run, that’s who. Terrible rule.