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?
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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?
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