Ban This!

Starting in 2023, Major League Baseball is instituting a ban on the “extreme shift,” a defensive alignment that positions three infielders on one side of second base.

The strategy — first implemented by Cleveland player-manager Lou Boudreau against left-handed slugger Ted Williams in 1946 and made famous by the St. Louis Cardinals’ use against him in that year’s World Series — has been typically reserved for a select few left-handed pull talents over the decades.

But in recent years, coinciding with a power-pull-launch angle approach to hitting along with technological advancements and data accessibility, where batters put balls in play have become more predictable, and defenses have responded accordingly. Shift-use by MLB teams has skyrocketed. In 2022, anextreme shift was implemented on 33.6% of plate appearances — up from 13.6% in 2016.

The game’s shift saturation has rubbed some players, coaches, and fans the wrong way. I get why people are annoyed by the shift: it’s really hard to hit a baseball, the game already skews heavily in favor of the pitcher and defense. Seeing balls in play that have been, more often than not, hits for a century and a half be easily scooped by a rogue third baseman positioned in shallow right is, by definition, annoying.

No matter how tempting it is, just because something is “annoying” doesn’t mean it should be axed — especially in such an unnatural and uncreative way as a blanket restriction.

The shift ban is the first breach of a long standing tradition that the game of baseball is played out on an open field.

The 1845 Knickerbocker rules (baseball’s Articles of Confederation) make no mention of where position players need to play, nor does it even mention a pitcher’s mound (or a “box” as it was initially conceived as and introduced in 1862).

Over the next hundred and fifty years, regulations covered how pitches are to be delivered, how many balls determine a walk, what material home plate should be made out of (marble or whitened rubber in 1885 to just rubber two years later), or the significant capitulation that a baseball could be covered — if necessary–in cowhide due to a horse shortage.

Equipment standardization and statistical minutiae make up the majority of the sport’s rule changes since 1901, but standard positioning as we know it has never been codified.

In the official MLB rulebook, Fielding Positions takes up less than half a page. Article 5.02(c) states “Except the pitcher and the catcher, any fielder may station himself anywhere in fair territory.”

There is no real distinction between a first baseman or second baseman, nor was there even an articulated limit to “infielders” or “outfielders.” Everything within the bounds of first and third base lines has always been deemed fair, an accessible plane for the 7 fielders behind the pitcher to roam unfettered from pitch to pitch.

There’s something wonderfully libertarian about the idea of not being forced to position a fielder at first or second or third base. From an aesthetic and philosophical vantage point, that’s a beautiful thing. The baseball diamond, unlike a cramped basketball court or overcrowded football field with its lines (visible or not) stretched between two opposing poles, is an open field of play. The gentle push and pull of wandering players as they cheat towards the bag or guard the line, or the instinctual adjustments pre-pitch in response to the batter’s last swing or his stance in the box, gives the game a natural list. Its like watching a herd of cows amble through pasture.

From a practical standpoint — much like libertarianism — there are a lot of obvious hang-ups. It doesn’t make much sense to leave first base uncovered but dammit, if I want to, I should be able to! Rules are a drag! There is something distinctly American about this thinking.

In 2023, baseball’s live free or die mentality will be pacified, dulled, reigned in. Part of the new shift rule is the defensive team “must have a minimum of 4 players on the infield.” Labels have been doled out; roles defined. Arbitrary boundary lines and restrictive areas will set us up for penalties like offsides and neutral zone infractions and drawn out umpire reviews in which New York will go frame by pixelated frame to judge when exactly the shortstop crosses the imaginary left/right side line in relation to the pitch.

That personally sounds more annoying to me, but Major League Baseball can do whatever it wants with the games played under its jurisdiction. No matter how flawed the logic might be, the commissioner’s office in collusion with team ownership have every right to tip the scales to produce the results they desire. Attempting intellectual arguments to try and change their determined path is like a Yankee Dolphin sailboat trying to tow a container ship around San Francisco Bay.

We’re all just bugs in their jar, man.

That being said, I don’t want to be talked down to about how the ban on the extreme shift will promote athleticism amongst infielders or restore “traditional outcomes” to balls in play.

“Restoring tradition” by un-traditional means is ironic, while forcing tradition is problematic at its core. The subtext of the language justifying this rule implementation is baseball doesn’t look like how we want it to look. That kind of thinking puts one on a slippery slope. Continually tapping the glass, shaking the jar will prove to be more and more of a problem requiring more and more oversight, more heavy-handed rule impositions, more gosh-danged tinkering that pushes baseball further away from its natural movements.

We’ve got it in our heads nowadays that on the field of baseball there are happy zones and sad zones. If a batter hits a ball in a happy zone (i.e. up the middle, in the gaps between players), they should be rewarded with a hit. Somehow the advanced development of defensive positioning (which came about as a natural response to developments in hitting) has directly threatened “traditional outcomes” of balls in play.

If we latch ourselves onto this rhetoric and reasoning and follow it to its natural end, mutual destruction is ensured. The game becomes pure data simulation between pitcher and batter, reduced and streamlined and distilled and reduced some more to 0s and 1s and probabilities and averages playing out on white board histograms in which outliers are gleefully disregarded, erased, nullified.

Paradoxically, this futuristic nightmare reality is exactly what MLB is trying to avoid. Sport as Spectacle! and Event! exists in that discrepancy between what should happen and what actually happens. On the great Bell Curve of Baseball, fans watch the game exactly for the data points beyond those 2nd and 3rd lines of deviation.

I’m being dramatic. Baseball will be fine. Realistically, the absence of the extreme shift will largely go un-felt in the professional game. It won’t even be an absence because an absence connotes a feeling of loss. No one will long for the Williams Shift — except maybe me, based on how long I’ve thought about this topic and wrestled this article into existence.

But there will be a moment next season when left-handed one-dimensional slugger rolls a badly struck grounder through the hole between 2nd and 1st to spoil a no-hitter in the 9th and fans will burst into flames. This is in our future.

Whether we feel it or not, the game has changed. The core offensive strategy of baseball for a century could be distilled down to Wee Willie Keeler’s famous proverb: Hit ’em where they ain’t!

Now, with the shift ban, it’s Hit ’em where they ain’t allowed to be.