Is This Still the Same Sport? Thoughts on the Shift Ban
You certainly won’t see this any time soon.
A Pup Named Scooby Doo was one of many spin-offs of the Scooby Doo series, and aired from 1988 to 1991. In nearly every episode of the show, Fred Jones believes he’s solved the mystery and blames the town bully, Red Herring.
Of course, Fred is wrong.
MLB viewership is declining. The 2022 World Series drew only about a quarter of the number of viewers that the 1978 World Series drew. Fewer people watched the 2022 All Star game than watched the average episode of 60 Minutes. Why is this? Well it’s obviously because ground balls to the left side of the infield are outs more frequently today than they were in 2005.
How do you win back the 32.5 million World Series viewers you lost in the last 45 years? You ban the shift, of course! The shift was the problem this whole time! The shift is the reason there’s less interest in baseball!
As we know, there are only four truly virtuous things you can do when you’re running the game of baseball.
Not punish a team that is revealed to have been running an egregious sign-stealing scandal that won them no fewer than two pennants and one World Series
Mess with the baseball in a poor attempt to produce the kind of batted ball distribution for which you have an aesthetic preference
Completely change the rules of baseball once you get to the 10th inning because if there’s anything baseball fans hate watching, it’s more baseball
Put strict rules around fielder positioning so that ground balls to the left side and up the middle are hits more often than they previously were
Thank goodness we have Rob Manfred, the only person on the planet who we can trust to be a good commissioner for the sport, to ensure those four things all happen! Even though we have our Dear Leader Bobby Manfred who can tell us what to think so our tiny stegosaurus brains don’t have to form our own opinions, let’s at least try to do so.
Operating with the constraints of publicly available data, it feels like it would make sense for us to try to find out what the effect of a significant increase in the use of the shift in recent years has been. Baseball Prospectus found that the shift really doesn’t help a defense against righties, so let’s isolate our analysis to LHBs.
Baseball Savant gives us team fielder positioning data back to 2016. In 2016, LHBs faced shifts in 24.3% of their PA. In 2022, LHBs faced shifts in 55% of their PA, that’s more than double the frequency! I bet it made a huge difference (I already know whether or not it made a huge difference).
The shift against a lefty hitter is most effective when that guy pulls a ground ball, so let’s compare the stat lines lefty hitters posted on pulled ground balls in 2016 and 2022.
To be clear, teams did all this shifting just for two points of wRC+. Two! Two measly points! Pulled ground balls off the bats of lefty hitters were effectively just as bad in 2022 as they were in 2016, in spite of the massive increase in shifts. Also, I’ve used the most charitable analysis here, because the wRC+ by lefties on pulled ground balls against the shift was HIGHER in 2022 than it was in 2016!
Given this, could it really be the case that the shift is the reason why nearly twice as many people watched the 2016 World Series as watched the 2022 World Series?
Of course not.
Opposing the shift is an aesthetic preference. If you oppose the shift, it’s because there are certain batted balls that you believe ought to be hits. A ground ball up the middle wasn’t fielded cleanly for an out very often when you were 12, so why should an MLB team with access to more data than you can imagine be able to position its fielders optimally?
Put aside the fact that MiLB data suggest there’s little evidence the shift ban will affect league-wide BABIP, and we have to ask ourselves what MLB is really pursuing. We know MLB think its fans hate the three true outcomes (well, two of them, or they wouldn’t have juiced the balls). We know MLB wants to pander to people who love batting average. We know MLB wants to scapegoat every possible thing except itself for baseball’s declining popularity. So I’m sure they’re right about the shift ban.
The data argument is hardly even the most powerful one here. Sure, there’s a chance we will see slightly fewer groundouts from left handed batters and slightly more balls in play in their PA (the shift is shown to make walks and strikeouts marginally more likely), but what does MLB think it’s doing by limiting the strategic arrows teams can have in their quivers?
Depending on how you view vacated wins (and how heavily you weight wins against the likes of Colgate and Niagara), Syracuse basketball coach Jim Boeheim has won something in the range of 1,100 games, putting him near the top of the all-time NCAA MBB coaching ranks (he’s a compiler, this will not be complimentary, he sucks and he killed someone with his car). Boeheim’s teams are known to employ the zone defense, in which players are responsible for covering the action happening on certain parts of the floor as opposed to covering specific players. This leaves open the opportunity to double team certain players, strategically leaving one offensive player open, particularly one who it would be difficult to reach with a pass.
What does that sound like to you? To me, it sounds like putting one infielder in shallow right field and leaving much of the left side open because you don’t think the batter would have an easy time hitting the ball in that direction.
Imagine a world in which the NCAA banned zone defense. Can’t do it anymore. Man to man only. And you can’t switch on picks, because then you’re not covering your assigned man anymore. Sorry, them’s the rules.
That would be insane, and we all know it would be insane. Handcuffing what a team is allowed to do defensively, whether it’s trapping a ball handler in the corner or patrolling the parts of the field where a ball is likely to be hit, is ridiculous. Teams know the risks they’re taking when they shift. I mean how many times have we seen this video of Robby Cano bunting for a double?
Let them do it!
There are plenty of rules across sports that govern aesthetic preferences, there’s no doubt about that. Why do you need two feet down in the NFL for a catch? Why is one knee equal to two feet? Why can you take a gather step and then two more steps before being called for a travel in the NBA? Why is the euro step legal? What’s the point of the 3-seconds rule? All of these are just aesthetic preferences. We want players to be in certain places at certain times and we want certain actions to have certain results.
It’s important to distinguish rules governing aesthetic preferences from rules actually aimed at results. For example, if we really wanted to influence batted ball results, we’d make a rule governing where outfielders position themselves, but changes in outfielder positioning are so much more difficult for us to notice than changes in infielder positioning (the average LF, CF, or RF plays deeper today than he did in 2015, and batted balls to outfielders have gotten less valuable since then), so we won’t do it.
Sure, there’s a chance that for some period of time, before teams figure out the optimal way to position their defenders under the constraints of the ban (I do not think this will take long) during which it may produce the in-game results that MLB is pursuing, but I don’t think that period of time will be long, and I don’t think MLB cares. MLB wants the game to look a certain way, particularly to the untrained eye. When you feel you’re in the middle of a crisis of popularity, that’s an understandable thing to do!
Don’t sell it to me as something you’re doing for the good of the game. Don’t sell it to me as something you’re doing to produce certain results (not only because putting your thumb on the strategic scale is dumb, but because you very well may be wrong). Don’t force your aesthetic preferences on me! If you want a baseball team to play a certain way, RUN A TEAM.
I don’t want to live in an echo chamber, so I reached out to some friends as well as our Twitter followers to source some other opinions. Here they are, in no particular order.
“I’m wishy washy on the shift rules. I like the idea of more action / higher averages / more baserunners, but LOVE wackiness, and this limits wackiness. It’s nice to see an infielder in shallow right and then a liner smoked right there and bam! It worked. Would argue that sequence is more entertaining than single.”
“Fixing defensive positioning probably leads to more offensive production and more exciting defensive efforts. Limiting defensive strategy inherently boosts the probability of offensive production and to make up for that on the defensive side you need to jump / run / dive a little more.”
“Good for Matt Olson, bad for evolution of the game.”
“I think it’s dumb. hitters should learn how to adjust to how the defense is lined up.”
“I think the shift ban deserves both attention and ridicule. If Manfred wants more runs he should just bring back the good baseball.”
Excited to see how teams get creative within the new rules and find loopholes
— NYY Takes (@pinstripepers) March 6, 2023
Brings back real baseball!
— Angry Mike the Yankees Fan! (@mgisel4) March 6, 2023
My view: the shift rule is an attempt to change the balance between the strategic optimization of the game and the aesthetics of the game.
— Matt G (Top .1% of Yankee Fans) (@matt_g_410) March 6, 2023
I'm not sold either way yet, but I'm excited to see which teams find a strategic edge with the new rules and what that strategy will be.
love it but dont love how it could still be manipulated like what boston has been doing moving their LF to shallow RF
— nadav s (@nadaviiisas) March 6, 2023
Love it. It was necessary to get more action going in the game.
— Tony newyork (@Tonynewyork1) March 6, 2023
Definitely looking forward to more base hits on hard hit balls and less dribblers the other way going for doubles. Im most excited for the increased offense and less emphasis on homer or bust but the increased athleticism will be a nice bonus too.
— The Great Hambino ⚾️ (@GreatHambino28) March 6, 2023
Really excited to see players range left and right more often to make diving plays. Balls hit up the middle being hits again will be refreshing. Curious to see how often teams use a 2 man outfield shift, and if MLB reacts with another rule change.
— Andrew Carter (@AndrewCarter47) March 6, 2023
It’s nice to see that our followers and friends have a wide range of opinions. Some of them are on the Rob Manfred Party Line (looking at you, Angry Mike), and others are more on my end (shoutout Bobby, Ryan, and Matt). Either way, some of us will be vindicated, others disappointed, and still others left somewhere in the middle.
For those of you who support the shift ban, I have a concerning stat for you. Last year, there were 16 players with at least 300 total PA who were shifted at least 87.5% of the time when batting left handed. Since this is my website, I’ll tell you who they were: Carlos Santana, Aaron Hicks, Kole Calhoun, Max Kepler, Rougned Odor, Max Muncy, Jose Ramirez, Corey Seager, Joey Gallo, Cody Bellinger, Kyle Schwarber, Seth Brown, Kyle Tucker, Yordan Alvarez, Shohei Ohtani, and Cal Raleigh.
Of those players, only Kepler (plagued by it his entire career), Seager (1% off), Alvarez (1% off), and Ohtani (a great hitter anyway, 3% off) hit ground balls at above the average rate for LHBs facing the shift (min. 120 PA against the shift in 2022). Look at that list, though. Joey Gallo, Kyle Schwarber, Cody Bellinger, Carlos Santana… What do those guys have in common? They’re above the league median (min. 300 PA) in three true outcomes percentage. I’m not convinced the shift ban is going to change that, especially since Russell Carleton found that it was likely the juiced ball, and not the shift, that drove the three true outcomes revolution.
The shift ban may not produce the results you want it to produce. The shift ban may not help the hitters you think it is going to help. The shift ban will change baseball’s aesthetics at the expense of good strategy (and at the expense of the attention of some fans who appreciate good strategy). The shift ban will make Rob Manfred very happy, until it inevitably blows up in his face like everything else he’s ever done. The shift ban will not restore baseball’s popularity.
Another Rob Manfred masterpiece. After you’ve tanked baseball’s popularity by exposing it for having no integrity (messing with the ball, handling the Astros scandal), fundamentally changing the rules (multiple years of shortened double headers, the runner on second in extras), and making sure fans can’t watch it (the streaming blackouts), you convince yourself that banning the shift will restore viewership. Good luck with that one, Bobby.
Do any of these villains getting unmasked look like Red Herring to you?
