On March 6th, Jon Heyman announced that the MLB and the player’s union have agreed to ban the shift amidst other rule changes for the upcoming season. While banning the shift is an idea many have floated around for a few years, the announcement comes as a surprise during labor negotiations between two sides that have more important fish to fry, and have been unable to agree on much else. Banning the shift is an idea that in theory tries to combat some of baseball’s biggest issues. But I believe it is a mistake that fundamentally changes the game for the worse, and exacerbates the issues it is trying to solve.
It is no secret that baseball is trending towards a three true outcomes game. Home runs, strikeouts, and walks are becoming more and more common, replacing balls in play that lead to exciting defensive plays and aggressive baserunning, among other things. They also balloon the dead time of games, as more pitches are thrown in between moments of action. This is no accident, as teams and players are intentionally changing their swings and approaches to hit more home runs. The result is an on-field product many fans are beginning to reject, and the MLB continues to decline in popularity in comparison to the NFL and NBA.
The shift plays right into this phenomena. As modern players focus more on hitting home runs, their swings become more predictable. Modern data allows teams to chart where hitters most often hit the ball, and adjust their defensive positioning, sometimes radically, to match. Hitters are not adapting either, instead trusting their home run output to counter any lost singles to the shift. The old adage of “hit’em where they ain’t” no longer applies. Or perhaps it does; they ain’t in the stands.
In theory then, eliminating the shift makes some sense. If baseball needs more baserunners, changing some of those hard ground ball outs to singles can help with that. By this point it has become clear that teams and hitters are broadly not willing to make adjustments to beat the shift, so perhaps baseball taking matters back into its own hands is a good thing.
For the last few years fans have grumbled about players who won’t just “bunt down the third baseline” or “change their swing to go the other way, they are professional hitters after all.” But in reality, placing down a perfect bunt against modern pitchers throwing at the top of the zone in the upper 90s is far more difficult than fans realize, and fundamentally changing swings that hitters have been taught their whole lives can take years, and time like that is a luxury players who are trying to stay on a big league roster simply cannot afford. Many players are right to complain.
Ted Williams was the first player to speak out against the shift, as he battled teams stacking up the right side of the infield throughout his career. Despite holding the highest on base percentage in league history, one wonders how much higher it could have been. Other hitters have been less lucky. Ryan Howard claimed that the shift took between 30 and 50 hits a year from him, and many analysts claimed that it killed the latter part of his career. More recently the shift played a big role in the downfall of Chris Davis. Modern sluggers like Joey Gallo often deal with extreme positioning like six man outfields, something he has publicly spoken out against.
But many players have adjusted. Back when Ryan Howard played, it was he himself who was criticized for failing to make adjustments, not the teams smart enough to deploy their defenses correctly. Some modern sluggers like Anthony Rizzo or Freddy Freeman are perfectly able to pick their spots and shoot singles to the opposite field when a baserunner is more valuable than the prospect of a bomb. Other left handed hitters like Rafeal Devers or Cedric Mullins each hit 30 or more home runs and were shifted on less than half the time. Ultimately it is up to the hitter how much he is shifted against, not the other way around.
Above all else however, eliminating the shift does nothing to get at the root of the problem, and the problem at its very core is simply that there are too many strikeouts. Teams are incentivising hitters to hit more home runs, and as a result forgiving them for striking out more.
We cannot fault the players for doing what they are being told and paid to do. Therefore, any rule changes designed to fix the three true outcomes issue, has to bring with it ways of incentivising front offices to change the ways they value the home run, and by extension player scouting and development. Currently, those front offices have shown that they are unwilling to take singles when there is an entire side of the field open for it. That will undoubtedly remain unchanged when the penalty of a ground out is removed from a pull happy home run swing. So far as I see it, banning the shift serves only to sprinkle a few lucky singles into swings that now have no deterrent from being home run or bust.
Players like DJ LeMahieu and David Fletcher, who gained value from being “shift proof,” have now lost that value, and the rule change does nothing to stop their style of play from disappearing, only helping the sluggers the game is trying to discourage.
Due to its rich history, baseball is often resistant to change, and it is good to see that the MLB is willing to try and tweak the game and move it into the modern era. However, each change must be made deliberately and with foresight of how it may alter the game beyond its intended consequence. The right of a team to deploy its defense as it sees fit is to me a fundamental part of the strategy of baseball, and eliminating it constricts the avenues teams have to gaining a competitive advantage. Watching infielders move mid-play towards where they would have been standing if the shift were allowed will look strange to say the least, and watching singles find artificially created holes might feel less satisfying than a normal hit. Ultimately, banning the shift is just a bandaid as the sport bleeds out into its death by three true outcomes.
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