What do you all think of telling defensive players where to play?
Crazy, eh?
Baseball being ruined by people who don’t really know baseball (even though they may work in the industry). All this tweaking will result in less viewership. Don’t they see it?
I haven’t cared about baseball since Curt Flood claimed he was a slave.
I think it's as stupid as telling NFL Defensive players that they have to line up the same exact way every game.
Then again, I haven't watched the NFL for two seasons now so for all I know that's actually happening now. Wouldn't surprise me, the same NFL that adopts the stupid policy letting players kneel during the National Anthem which drives a big chunk of their audience away would probably do something as stupid.
I like baseball just the way it is...esp the pace.
Slow or fast it’s a wonderful game, lovely to go 10 plus minutes without a vulgar indoctrinating commercial.
And finely, it’s totally ridiculous to mess with the fielders position.
You want scoring watch or play cricket. An exceptional at bat is scoring a hundred runs or more. It’s called a century. If your ball manages to avoid the fielders and rolls to the edge of the playing field (Oval) you get 4 runs. Hit it into the stands you get six (called hitting for six). I guess it’s the equivalent of a home run. No foul lines so every ball is fair. Cricket is baseball on steroids. Pre civil war Cricket and Baseball were about equivalent in popularity in the US. The rise of baseball was due a great deal to soldiers playing the game.
That’s COMMUNIST! Restrict a players freedom - so it’s communist!
Lessee, another way would be to put a weight on the pitcher’s pitching arm.........or make the first baseman have to stand 10’ from the bag, and run to it for every ball hit.........
Already “the thinking man’s sport” is suffering in attendance - communist rules will only make it worse.......
LEAVE THE PERFECT GAME ALONE!
Pro baseball too slow paced. Why? Drives me crazy if I’m at the game, more so if it’s hot.
Have played senior softball for the last 9 years. Bat LH and pull the ball mostly. They started shifting on me 8 years ago so I worked on hitting the ball to left field during batting practice. After a few times got the hang of it.
So after learning how to hit to the opposite field next time they shifted on me in a game just hit a slow grounder to where the third baseman should have been and got a hit. After doing this a few times they stopped shifting on me.
If you can’t hit to the opposite field , well that’s not much of a ball player to begin with.
I’m all for a ban though, SS or 2B can play as close to 2B as they want but can’t cross.
The shift is boring and I hate seeing guys getting thrown out at first by the second basemen who is playing in short right field.
Seems un American somehow.
That’s the limit though, no other restrictions on where the defense can set up.
MLB needs more runners on base. It needs batters stretching their hits. It needs base stealing.
Shorten the base paths by 2 feet and you get the game we grew up loving to watch and play.
Dunno about shifting, but our Nation’s downhill slide truly began with the advent of the designated hitter.
It all started with Bud Selig. He could not leave well enough alone and this garbage is his legacy.
If a hitter doesn’t like the shift he needs to learn how to hit to all fields.
Billy Hamilton of the Reds is the fastest man in baseball, but he refuses to learn how to be a good bunter. So his batting average and on-base percentage routinely suck. Should baseball mandate that all infielders play on the outfield grass when he is at bat to improve his OBP? OR, should Hamilton make the effort to learn how to lay down the bunt?
Both Andrew McCutchen and Brandon Belt beat the shift last night for base hits. Not that it made a difference in the game.
The shift is a risk for the defense, one that pays off more times than not, but a risk nevertheless.
If a team wants to employ it, who’s to say they can’t? There’s NOTHING in the rule book that specifies the position of the defense other than the pitcher.
“Leave baseball alone!”
I don’t care for the shifts either, a good savvy hitter will learn to go the opposite way against the shift but some will say you are still beating him by not letting him hit with power if he is a power hitter.
Hopefully, the MLB Commissioner will abandon this idiocy as soon as a few actual baseball fans are polled, whereby this patently asinine notion will be laughed out of the room...
Unsportsmanlike. It’s the baseball version of icing the kicker
Eliminate the batting lineup.
It sounded preposterous at first, but as I learned more details it began to make more sense. The general idea is:
1. There is no set order for a team to send its batters to the plate. The manager sends up his leadoff hitter, and then selects each batter after that however he sees fit.
2. This would make each inning very unpredictable, and it would be much harder for a pitcher to work through a "weak" part of a lineup.
3. Every player has to bat in a normal "batting cycle." That is, a player can't bat for a second time until everyone in the lineup has batted at least once, and so on. It's just that the order can change from one inning to the next.
4. This forces managers to weigh risk-reward options at every step of the game. If it's the top of the first inning and your first two batters are out, why send up a #3 hitter who is usually one of the best hitters in your lineup with the bases empty and two outs? Save him for the second inning! Send up your weakest hitter instead. In the National League, this might be the ideal spot to send your pitcher up to the plate instead of waiting until he becomes a rally-killer in the second or third inning.
5. The "Earl Weaver Rule" would still be in effect. That's the rule MLB adopted to deal with a bizarre lineup strategy the old manager deployed a few times back in the 1970s. Under this rule, every player in the starting lineup must bat at least once unless the opposing team changes pitchers.
6. This "open-lineup" concept would be a great weapon to diminish the effectiveness of relief pitchers late in the game. It's impossible for a manager to set up left-right relief pitcher sequences late in the game if he doesn't know which hitters are coming up next!
Any thoughts on this, baseball fans? LOL.
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Thanks for the ping; post. As a pitcher, I would have liked the idea of a defensive strategic shift behind me although back in my day none were used in high school and college...besides I would have figured I could get the hitter out regardless.