2023 was a really sad year for major league baseball. That was the year they announced that dead pull hitting was, regrettably, an incurable disease. Despite more than a century of study and practice they had come to the unavoidable conclusion there was no way to change the hitter, so they decided to change the game. For good.
The defensive shift was now basically dead. Prior to 2023, fielders (other than the catcher) could stand anywhere in fair territory before the pitch giving the defense complete freedom to shift as necessary.
That could mean putting three infielders on the pull side, or all four infielders on one side of second base or moving an infielder into shallow right field. You could even employ four outfielders if the data said so.
The hitter and the situation dictated the defense based mainly on meticulously-detailed historical data known as spray charts – the forerunner to digital analytics – or the occasional managerial hunch (before hunches became really uncool).
But those days are over. Now MLB isn’t merely discouraging shifts, they’ve completely dictating where defenders must stand before every pitch.
The new rules require four infielders. Two to the left of second base and two to the right. All four infielders must have both feet within the infield boundary (the dirt/defined infield area) when the pitcher begins delivering the pitch and four-outfielder alignments are strictly prohibited.
Major League Baseball has essentially said: “We have years of data proving exactly where this hitter hits the ball, but the defense isn’t allowed to act on that information.”
Misguided. Idiotic. Call it what you want but baseball has completely lost the plot.
These new rules aren’t just ludicrous, they’re ironic. On the one hand baseball is intoxicated with its own utter devotion to analytics but, on the other, it decides to fumble the findings. More so, it cherry-picks what to do with them.
Imagine what managers would have done with these sorts of analytics years ago. They would have provided an invaluable resource – strategic decisions backed by irrefutable data – but baseball said No.
Rather than pinch hitting for the dead pull hitter or teaching him to learn how to hit to the opposite way, baseball instead chooses to penalize the defense. So, the best way to manage a slippery road is to oversteer? Pure lunacy.
And make no mistake, the issue is oversteering, whether you’re travelling in a vehicle or running Major League Baseball. When a problem occurs how much you correct for it is the answer, with nuance being the key.
The National Hockey League had the same kind of troubling issue during the Clutch and Grab era of the 1990’s when routine interference was plaguing the sport.
The problem wasn’t overt – just a tug here and a pull there – but the game was grinding to a halt because of this unintentionally intentional obstruction.
The New Jersey Devils took it to an artform by inventing The Neutral Zone Trap, a strategy meant to deliberately clog up the neutral with “incidental” interference that would limit their opponent’s speed through the neutral zone. Offensive rushes moved like clogged arteries in the Dead Puck era, and the beauty of the game paid for it.
So, the NHL decided to take a standby forcing officials to penalize interference as it’s clearly defined in the rulebook. The solution was to simply call penalties as warranted in the sport’s design.
It was a painful process to start, with seemingly marginal infractions becoming two-minute minors, but eventually the players started to adapt, and the natural flow of hockey returned to the game.
The problem was solved because the league recognized when it’s appropriate to intervene and, in this case, the intervention was nothing more than a return to calling penalties as they’re written.
In the Big Book Of Managerial Steering, we call that Gentle Correction. Nothing more than a tiny nudge to help the game find equilibrium. This is the middle setting.
In contrast, a Hard Correction is needed when the game can’t fix itself because the solution is outside the rules of the game. Like when Bill Belichick asked the snow removal guy to remove some snow before the Patriots attempted a game winning field goal during a blizzard. With no rule in place to say Belichick couldn’t employ the services of snowplow, he decided to do it. Points to him for helping redefine the game but it only happened once because the NFL put in a rule so it wouldn’t happen again.
The third method of steering is No Correction At All. Here the game is left alone, allowing it to correct itself. Where coaching will eventually fix the problem caused by other coaching.
This is what was needed to “fix” the extreme defensive shifting that was becoming so commonplace in baseball. Keep in mind that “commonplace” doesn’t equate to “wrong” but in this case, MLB saw an opportunity to make wholesale changes to the game, with the shift issue being seen as the culprit. Or the excuse, if you’re willing to see it that way.
Either way, baseball was bound and determined the game needed to change even though it didn’t. But MLB was intoxicated with its new, streamlined 11-member rules committee that could hasten change in a way never seen before.
This wasn’t really about the shift at all but more about the shift in baseball’s thinking. They were determined to see more offense in the game and these severe restrictions to the shift weren’t done in isolation. They were bundled together with a pitch clock, larger bases, and pickoff limitations but let’s not avoid seeing it for what it was: an identity crisis. The shift was simply the first victim.
But it didn’t need to be this way. This was a problem that would have solved itself.
Think of how this would have played out, because with every drastic change in a game – one within the rules at least – there comes a natural correction. When one side exploits a gap in the game it’s not long before we see a strategic counter measure.
Think of how extreme these shifts had become. Four defensive players crammed between first and second, or second and third, created huge holes on the opposite side of the diamond. Those holes are huge, unrealized opportunities. Not just metaphorically.
If MLB had allowed this to play out it would have seen strategies enacted to correct the imbalance, like unexpected bunts or having players simply become better at hitting to the opposite field. The “brilliance” of the shift would have exposed a severe flaw in its thinking because now half the diamond was open to be exploited. And it would have been if baseball had let this whole dilemma play out.
But they didn’t. They unnecessarily changed the game by imposing a mandate that has taken a baseball in a new direction. A direction, for this writer, that has forever altered what is the game of baseball.
The game overcorrected. If they had just allowed these knots to unravel themselves, they could have saved baseball, from itself.