Baseball just outlawed the shift, and people opposed to that will always lament “why can’t they hit it where the shift isn’t?”
Obviously, even for professional hitters, this is hard. Why is that? Does it have to do with the pitch type and pitch location? If not that, is it something else other than batter handedness and tendencies?
In: 22
Well, a big part of it is that the shift is tailored to an individual hitter’s tendencies.
If you’ve been a pull hitter your entire life, then the defense starts playing you shifted to the pull side, you can’t just decide to become an opposite field hitter overnight.
It’s like a default setting, for lack of a simpler term. The absolute best hitters are whole field hitters with no overt tendencies to use the shift against. The defense just has to play them straight up and hope the don’t hit one into the gaps. That’s why they’re the best hitters.
Not everyone has the ability to be the best though.
Another often overlooked aspect is that the battery (pitcher and catcher) are working with the shifted defense to induce a ball hit into the shift.
For example, a left-handed pitcher facing a left-handed batter known to be a pull hitter will have the defense shifted towards first base. That pitcher isn’t going to throw a slider low and away so the batter can poke it down the third base line. The pitcher is going to pitch him inside where all the batter can do is turn on the pitch and pull it towards first.
[removed]
A player’s swing takes years to craft and perfect. The shift really only started gaining popularity in baseball in the past 6-7 years, and only became something everyone did around 2018. Many players’ swings are designed to hit ball hardz making it hard to adjust.
The value of a home run greatly outweighs the value of a single, so it’s generally always better to hit ball hard.
Beating the shift would require a batter to hit ball less hard in order to hit ball the other way.
Hitting ball other way is very hard, harder than hitting ball hard if you’ve always hit ball hard.
Hit ball hard hitters still hit ball hard, since hard hit balls produce more runs.
So harder to beat shift than to hit ball hard, so just hit ball hard.
ELI5 what is the shift?
Even at the highest levels, there are very few hitters capable of hitting hard to all fields. And it’s only gotten tougher now that every staff is stocked with guys who can throw in the high-90s and hitters commonly see multiple pitchers every single game. This is a rule to help increase the chances of base runners resulting from the ball being put into play.
Defense shifts factor in hundreds if not thousands of at-bat sample size and advanced analytics. Certain guys just have a tendency to hit the ball certain ways more often due to their stance, body type, swing mechanics, where they stand in the batter’s box, lot of things.
It’s hard to just change your hitting method after decades of muscle memory and training. Most shifts accommodate a guy ‘pulling’ the ball, which I guess is more natural than pushing it opposite field (lefty hitting it left, righty hitting it right).
All kinds of detailed answers ITT but the real answer is that modern hitters have been taught that home runs are absolutely critical and strikeouts are no problem, so swing for the fences.
No matter where the defense plays you, those incentives don’t change.
It’s absolutely possible for a power hitter to bunt his way on base a large percentage of the time against an extreme shift, but sometimes it won’t work, and statistically the value-add won’t be all that great anyway, and who the hell is going to give a $100M contract to some guy who bunts all the time?
The cool thing about baseball is the rules are very minimal. The actual plays are more of an emergent phenomena based on physics. Balks and the infield fly rule are some of the few patches needed to prevent the game from devolving. Setting rules setting where players can stand seems counter to this minimalism. Having never read the official rule book, are infield vs outfield players even mentioned?
I can’t stand this new rule. It’s terrible for the game.
want to beat the shift? Learn to bunt. You don’t even have to change your natural tendencies to do that. But if you bunt again and again, then teams will stop shifting. At that point you start swinging away again.
this new rule really dumbs the game down. It caters to lesser players, and reduces strategic choices.
Never mind the “shift”, why is Shoei Ohtani still allowed to hit when he has been subbed off the mound?
Latest Answers