Nevius: Good riddance to baseball’s defensive shifts

Our regular lunch group finally had to make a rule:

No more debates about the defensive shift in baseball.

It was silly, really. A small group of post-middle-age guys arguing about whether Major League Baseball should allow teams to overload one side of the infield because statistics showed that the batter consistently hit the ball there.

It turned out to be a contentious issue. Voices were raised. Feelings were bruised. We began spamming each other with links to articles to support our opinion.

And I suspect our lunches were a microcosm of baseball fans everywhere.

Because that’s the deal with the bat-and-ball crowd. Football fans argue about the officiating. Basketball viewers want to debate who is the greatest of all time.

And old-fashioned baseball aficionados, staid and set in their ways, are very wary of changes in the game. Talk to them and it won’t be long before you hear “the sanctity of baseball.”

The funny thing with our group, and a lot of longtime fans, is that they are apoplectic at changes like the “phantom runner,” where a base runner is sent to second base to start extra innings.

The idea behind that is to get a quicker result, to keep tie games from dragging out into the wee hours of the evening.

It seems sensible. The long, long overtime games burn out pitchers, increase the chance for injuries and — c’mon — how many people are watching when the game spins into its fourth hour?

Nope, true believers say. Baseball games have to run their course, even if it means the 12th or 14th inning. That’s baseball tradition.

Right, I’d say, tradition like putting the shortstop in right field? You think that’s fine, but a pitch clock is a travesty?

As all right-thinking Americans know, the shift is a bad idea. It suppresses hitting, makes the game more boring and — as we will show in a moment — may have contributed to the kind of wild swings and wholesale strikeouts that true-blue fans lament.

And yet, thoughtful, reasonable people have been defending it for years.

It’s simple, they say, “Just hit the ball the other way.” If a left-handed hitter is looking at a shift that has overloaded the right side of the infield, he should just doink the ball into the empty space where the shortstop used to be. Simple.

Yeah, let’s see you do that in today’s game, where pitchers are throwing 98 mph with some movement.

“First,” MLB Silver Slugger award winner Matt Carpenter told ESPN, “it’s not that easy. And second, it is the thing (grounding to the shortstop) you’ve taught yourself to avoid your entire career.”

Well, Carpenter should be happy this year. As you’ve heard, MLB has finally banned the shift. And left-handed hitters like him will once again be looking to drive pitches to the hole between first and second.

It’s not the only rule change this year. There are several. The pitch clock, mandating that pitchers and hitters pick up the pace, is getting lots of attention. And I suppose new, bigger bases will have an effect. The phantom runner is back to infuriate traditionalists.

But I am going to opine that when this season ends, we will look back and say the biggest change, creating the biggest difference, was eliminating the shift.

The new rule is two infielders must stand on either side of second base and they have to be standing on the dirt when the ball is pitched — just like when the game was invented.

And just in case there’s anyone who is still pooh-poohing the effect of the shift on the game, we have receipts.

Last year the collective major league batting average was .243, the lowest since 1968.

Clearly, teams have embraced the shift. In 2017, according to Sports Illustrated, Houston won the World Series using a shift 35% of the time. Last year, the Dodgers employed a shift 53% of the time.

Major league hitters, no dummies, realized the overloaded infield was there to stay. So they had to come up with a strategy to beat it.

And, as respected baseball pundit Jayson Stark has said, the answer was, “Let’s hit the ball over those shifts.”

That’s when the new-age batting theory of swinging to get the ball in the air was hatched.

And, Stark adds, thoughtful baseball insiders have “also concluded that those uppercut swings are fueling the tsunami of strikeouts.”

In fact, the strikeouts of batters in MLB has risen steadily since 2005. Between 1970 and 2006, baseball’s strikeout rate was around 15-16%. Now it is nearly twice that.

To the exasperation of baseball purists, hitters are swinging up and for the fences. There’s often not an attempt to put the ball in play. They’re either going to hit it in the air or strike out.

And this is where the irony comes in. Until now, with the shift, there’s been no advantage to hitting a ground ball — even a hard-hit one.

But now, players may stop swinging for the fences and instead, pad their batting stats by drilling a grounder through the infield.

In other words, banning the shift might actually encourage the kind of baseball the anti-shift-ban folks say they want to see. It could work FOR their argument.

Maybe we can talk about that over lunch.

Contact C.W. Nevius at cw.nevius@pressdemocrat.com. Twitter: @cwnevius