MLB World Series 2018: Eh. Dodgers/Boston. Eh.

Seriously. I grew up watching Wade Boggs, Don Mattingly, Tony Gwynn and Will Clark play. They never faced shifts because they hit the ball the other way. Why today’s players can’t understand this is something I’ll never understand.

 

^I’m not sure why he’d keep playing after this season, as he’s done everything he needs to do to cap off his career.

 

Just wait, it's coming. The NFFL (The National Flag Football League)

 

...I'd watch that.

 

Add Jayson Werth to the group that hates analytics.

 

Recently, players have tried to explain (whine) that it's "sooooo haaaard" to make the alterations necessary to beat the shift.

No. Just, no. Even Ted Williams finally realized he had to adapt.

It's about 90 percent ego involvement. In Ben Bradlee Jr.'s biography of Ted Williams, he said Williams's first reaction to the Boudreau shift was to laugh at it and just try to blast a ball into it for a hit. It wasn't working. Some of it was ego involvement, some it was stubbornness, and some was Williams didn't want to significantly alter his swing and screw himself up.

Then he learned to beat it. In a 1993 interview with Bob Costas, Williams said he first tried to beat it by standing as close to the plate as he always did, but he'd swing inside out to send the ball to left field. The problem was being so close to the plate, it weakened his swing and it just wasn't a solution. He said Paul Waner gave him the answer. Just move away from the plate, and now almost every pitch is outside, and you've got to swing to put it into left field. That ended it. Williams started to beat the shift, and Boudreau pretty much stopped using it.

 

Most of the complaints about the shift that I have seen somehow relate to how it destroys offense or changes the batter's mindset into "hit the home run or strikeout."
Reading over the team stats available on mlb.com
Runs Scored - by year from 2010 onward
2010 - 16 teams scored 700 or more runs
'11 - 16 teams
'12 - 17 teams
'13 - 11 teams
'14 - 8 teams
'15 - 10 teams
'16 - 19 teams
'17 - 24 teams
'18 - over 19 teams have scored more than 500 runs (average runs per game = approx. 4.5 thus they will likely score over 700 runs) so we could end up with 20 or more teams scoring over 4.5 runs a game.
It seems that the shift hasn't impacted overall offense, in fact the short term trend seems to indicate the opposite.
However, K numbers are up...
Since 2014 29 teams have had 1100 or more strikeouts each season, and it appears as all 30 teams will exceed 1100 Ks a game in 2018 - that is approx 6.7 strikeouts a game.
Home run numbers have also soared - since 2015
2015 - 18 teams had more than 150 HRs
2016 - 26 teams had more than 150 HRs
2017 - 29 teams had more than 150 HRs with the Yankees average more than one a game.
2018 - 8 teams have more than 150 HRs and looking over averages it appears as if about 26 teams will have over 150 HRs at the end of the season.

So I am not seeing any reason to bemoan the advent of the shift... and some advantages as it actually speeds up the game and provides more of what the fans love - strikeouts and home runs.

 

But seriously, Manfred wants the game to go faster... right? Strikeouts help that goal, dummy. The MLB is so weird - everyone missing a bunch of dudes standing on base scratching themselves before trotting back to the dugout because the pitcher sucks as a batter.

 

Strikeouts meant more when not striking out meant more to batters and not so many were doing it so frequently.

I'm also not sure more strikeouts speed up games. More strikeouts means deeper counts, which means more pitches. That actually adds time to the game.

There's an average of almost 8.5 strikeouts per game this year per team -- so 17 strikeouts total, or roughly 30 to 33 percent of the outs. The average per team per game was below 6 until 1994, and occasionally below 5 between 1960 and 1994. In that context, when Bob Gibson or Nolan Ryan struck out 10 or 12 batters, that was an accomplishment of merit. Yes, there are more hard-throwing pitchers of that ilk today, but batters are also swinging from their heals more rather than just swinging to make solid contact because striking out a lot isn't such a big deal any more.

Stanton strikes out once every three at bats. Dave Kingman never even approached that.

 

Is that actually the case? That seems like a claim that could be disputed. A strike out takes what, an average of 6-8 pitches to complete? How much time does it take to complete a successful hit, plus work your way around the bases?
I could see that argument that first pitch groundouts are the fastest way to speed up the game, but who wants THAT?

 

Yes. It seems that's actually the case. Tom Verducci pointed out in SI not long ago that in 1986, the average MLB game was 2:45 and had 57 BIP and 11 strikeouts. Today (2018), the average game is 19 minutes longer, with 17 strikeouts and 49 BIP. The run environment averaged 8.82 total runs per game in 1986. It's at 8.74, today. So run-scoring is about the same.

This year, for the first time ever in the history of the game, there were more strikeouts in MLB than hits. The total right now is 29037 hits and 29044 strikeouts. That's a 1:1 ratio right now. In 1986, it was 1.5 hits for every strikeout. In 1980, it was 1.9 hits per strikeout. In 2000, the ratio was 1.4 to every strikeout.

As Verducci points out, we're seeing fewer balls in play and games are taking longer than ever. The frequency of strikeouts is part of the problem. As Whitey Ford used to say, a perfect game isn't 27 strikeouts, it's 27 pitches. Or as Crash Davis put it back in 1988, "Strikeouts are boring."

 

Rhys Hoskins leads all of baseball in pitches per plate appearance (4.44) and, not surprisingly, walks and strikes out at a high rate. Interestingly, half of his hits have come with two strikes. His approach seems to work for him, but I can’t imagine it’s conducive to a more rapid pace of play. As far as I know, however, average at-bat length is not a statistic baseball is keeping at the moment.

 

Thanks for all the information, but couldn't the increase of home runs (which take time out of the game for the trot and the pageantry) also lead to lengthier games? An increase of 19 minutes could be due to more than one factor...

 

^Certainly, particularly in cases where they’re followed by pitching changes.

Replay wasn’t around in 1986, so there’s no way to know what impact that would have had on games. While I think replay has been good for baseball overall, it does add to the length of games. I’m actually surprised it doesn’t have a time limit before a call has to confirmed or overturned.

 

A simple countdown clock for both batter and pitcher would speed things up tremendously. You have x amount of seconds to get ready to hit each pitch and each batter can only call "time" once per game. You have x amount of time between each pitch (this might need to be tweaked due to baserunners trying to steal) to set for the next pitch.
Time for MLB's version of a "shot clock"