Posted by d_rock97 on 5/15/2021 3:15:00 PM (view original):
Posted by crazystengel on 5/15/2021 12:33:00 PM (view original):
Outlaw the shift. Defenses have to have two infielders on either side of second base. And no infielders in the outfield before the pitcher releases the ball. Can't go beyond the dirt.
MLB needs more balls in play. More running, more fielding. The HR-K-BB "Devil's Triangle" is tiresome.
What I think is interesting is that groundballs has decreased every year since the shift has been put on. Batters aren’t hitting into the shift like they were earlier in the decade (or 2010s), they’re hitting over the shift. And BABIP has remained constant despite the rise in shifts employed.
That last part of your post is really, really interesting. And it suggests that the shift is a failure, that it is not reducing hits, merely reducing "shifting" hits. And making the game more boring.
Bill James, on page 316 of his "Historical Baseball Abstract" wrote the following:
"In all sports, in all shared activities, the interests of one party are often at odds with the interests of the game itself."
He then gives the example of batters stepping out of the box to mess up the pitchers' timing. This does not work to the interests of the pitchers, any individual team per se, the fans or the game. Only the batter. So he calls on umpires to stop calling time.
The problem is that sabermetrics while honing its brilliant analytical tools, started with the wrong questions to ask. It started with "what results in teams winning more games?"
Over time James and other showed that OBP, more power hitting, more strikeouts by pitchers, having the other team see your pitchers less often and for less time, all mattered, while other things like speed, complete games, stolen bases, teamwork, team spirit, leadership, clutch hitting, hit and runs, crafty as opposed to power pitching, bunting and productive outs that moved runners over were pretty negligable, or even counter-productive.
But they might have asked, "what are the most exciting and enjoyable things in baseball?", "what do we like most about baseball?" "How can we make some of those things like bunting, steals, triples, complete games, etc. more productive also of wins for teams, so they would also be in the narrower self-interest of teams as well as being in the larger interests of the game itself, the fans, enjoyment and aesthetic beauty?"
The analytical tools that might be developed in answering those questions are hard to imagine, but then so were the things we have learned from answering the questions that were asked: the three true outcomes, for example, or three times through the order, and all the new measuring sticks, from exit velocity on down.
Notice how in the end, the questions asked by sabermetrics have been to the benefit of only one party and at odds with the interests of the game itself. The teams are, even collectively, only one interest. Individually they are no different than the batter in the example of stepping out of the batter's box. Who cares if they win if the game is not worth watching?
This is always the Achilles Heel of all Cartesian thought, from the field of economics to that of genetically modified foods: the interest in on HOW to do something, not WHAT to do. And so all the research begins by asking the wrong research question. No Economics textbook I have ever read, and I have read a lot of them, starts by asking "how can we make sure that everyone who wants to and is able to work and contribute to society has a comfortable material life and economic security?" And yet this is WHAT the economy is FOR. It serves no other purpose. In other words, it serves no purpose to most of us most of the time. Same with Sabermetrics.
It became a servant of the front offices. Not the fans, not the game.
"He that breaks a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom" says Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings, (the line didn't make the movies, which is sad). This is Tolkien railing against the Cartesian spriritual vacuum he saw around him, personified by Saruman. This is the world we live in now.
Lech Walesa once wrote that you can make fish soup out of an aquarium, but it is much harder to make an aquarium out of fish soup. The dangerous thing about Cartesian thought put into practice, is that it does find truths. But they are truths about the wrong questions. So we can never un-know that it is better to change pitchers every two batters late in the game to avoid three times through the order, or that you should never steal if your name is not Brock, Henderson, Raines, or Coleman, or that pitchers who craft their pitches to get ground ball outs are not actually doing anything, (what the hell WAS Greg Maddux doing all those years that he wasn't mainly striking people out?), or that strikeouts by batters are no worse than any other kind of out, better even because they wear down the pitcher, walks too, so they are better than singles, and so on.
These things ARE true, but they are truths about the wrong questions. Or rather they are CORRECT but not really TRUE. Since, as Hegel pointed out "THE TRUTH IS THE WHOLE". and the whole is baseball, the game, and the fans who love it and the players who once played it for the joy of playing it (thank you Ernie Banks and Don Mattingly), and it is the attachment we have to our teams and their historic moments, and the players and their tragedies and their moments of triumph. Ask the Montreal Expos fans. Ask the Brooklyn Dodgers fans.
Yet Bill James apparently (why can't we find a recording of this?) said at one of the recent Sabermetrics summits that the players are not important in baseball, they don't matter, the game is the same anyway. Yet when they tried replacement players during the Spring training of 1995 during the strike no one wanted to see them.
The truth is the whole. So, let's challenge the sabermetrics community: guys, find out what would make bunting and stealing bases productive, what would make changing pitchers counter-productive, what would make focusing on home runs and players with too many strikeouts unproductive of wins, what would make it rational to have more complete games by starters, to hit and run. Find that out, tell us what to change to make it happen, and we will let you back in the ballparks, even buy you a hot dog.