Banning the shift.........taking back baseball from the stat geeks and having a more entertaining game.

[deward]

6 hours ago, owknows said:

Can't believe I'm ostensibly on the same side of an issue as Corn... but baseball has fundamental rules.

9 players on the field.

When someone figures out how (within the rules) to get the most strategic defensive value out of those 9 players.... baseball demands that they stop doing that, and that they intentionally configure their team to get sub-optimal value out of their defense.

Because some players can't cope.

What's next?

No pitching over 85 mph?

Baseball is an entertainment product. Rules should be able to evolve in order to keep the product optimally entertaining. Yelling at players to just figure it out while the game dies is a terrible solution.

[DrungoHazewood]

7 hours ago, deward said:

Baseball is an entertainment product. Rules should be able to evolve in order to keep the product optimally entertaining. Yelling at players to just figure it out while the game dies is a terrible solution.

Baseball is like cricket, in that there's long been a vocal contingent shouting "it's not cricket!" every time someone suggests some tweak to make the game more engaging to someone other than die hard fans.  In cricket's case soccer passed it as the most popular sport in the UK roughly 130-140 years ago and has never looked back.  Cricket became a bit of a niche sport because it took day(s) for a match that includes multiple tea breaks, and strategies that basically involve bunting ball after ball into the ground to spoil pitches and play defense. It's only been recently that other variations of the sport like 20-20 have become very popular because they finally adopted rules that greatly increased action and decreased the time to complete a game.

In baseball really the only major on-field rules change from 1905 until very recently was the DH. Sure, they'd occasionally clarify the boundaries of the strike zone, or remember they were supposed to enforce mound heights, secretly change the ball, or change how many teams made the playoffs.  But 99% of the rules were the same in 1908 when the White Sox hit three homers all year as they were in Barry Bonds' prime. But the game was wildly, completely different.  That's because the traditionalists who ruled refused to make any changes and, paradoxically, everything changed. By sticking to the idea that God handed Alexander Cartwright the rules on stone tablets that will never be modified they opened the door to every manager and GM and player to innovate within the gray areas and ambiguities in those rules. And there are many.  Gentleman's agreements about how the game is to be played get pushed aside when wins and losses are on the line.

People often moan about how there are no longer any complete games, that every team has 11 anonymous relievers, that everyone is just trying to strike out every batter and every batter is trying to hit the ball 800 feet, and defense has never been less important, and base stealing doesn't make sense so nobody really does it. All those things are true because nobody did anything about any of it for 100 years.

If you loved baseball as it was when you were 12 AND you're going to never change the rulebook you'd better be pretty sure the rules very strictly defined the game as it was when you were 12.  Or you'll wake up one day when you're 40 or 60 or 80 and see that everything is different, you don't like a lot of it, and baseball is the 2nd or 3rd or 5th most popular sport in the country. And that's exactly what happened.

[Lurker]

On 9/19/2022 at 7:01 PM, DrungoHazewood said:

To make the game more interesting.  To reduce the amount of time where you have seven fielders drifting off to sleep because the ball's never in play.  To take it back to the way it was meant to be and as it was played for more than a century, as a sport that typically takes two hours or so. To allow my children, aged 15 and 14 to finally, for the first time in their lives, to have fighting chance to see a 9th inning of a weekday game before going to bed.

Any reasonable organization regularly looks at its weaknesses and proposes improvements.  For a long time baseball has looked at its weaknesses and proclaimed that they were really strengths and that the fans who were leaving didn't really understand baseball.  I'm not a fan of banning the shift, but I'm very happy that they've finally gotten out of their 100 year rut of proclaiming every bug to be a feature and hoping nobody notices they're full of it.

My dad always let us stay up to watch baseball. He even took me out of school to watch day games from time to time.

Those were special memories, watching Koufax and Drysdale at Chavez Ravine, with a Carnation chocolate shake in one hand and peanuts in the other.

Baseball has never been boring to me…ever.

Edited September 25, 2022 by Lurker