How To Fix Baseball

I have cracked the case.

Jayson Stark had a feature yesterday in The Athletic about the shift. You know, should we ban it, does it work, what do players think, the whole thing. His conclusions, or at least the ones I want to focus on, boil down to a few points:

• The shift definitely works.

• One potential rule to limit it, the “two fielders on each side of second base” rule, doesn’t make much of a difference, because the shortstop can still play right up the middle and cut off line drives that used to be hits.

• A different potential rule to limit the effects of the shift, the “all infielders must position themselves on the infield” rule, does seem to work.

The question is, what should baseball do? As always, the answer is that it’s complicated.

First, there’s the question of whether baseball should do anything at all. Purists will argue that everything is fine. The shift is teams being smart on defense; the only solution is for teams to be smart on offense. But while that’s the logical answer, at this point it doesn’t seem to be the practical one. Hitters should adapt to the shift by hitting the ball to the opposite field (or, as I’ve argued, bunting down the third base line literally every at-bat that they face a shift until the defense stops shifting), but those adaptations will take ages to happen, if they happen at all.

While it’s true that the shift is just teams being smart on defense, it’s also undeniable that the shift has taken some fun out of the game. A hard line drive up the middle or to right field should be a hit. For a century or more up until the last few years, that’s how players learned to hit. Now they swing for home runs more, but the principle is the same: a hard line drive to the outfield should usually be a hit. It’s easy to change the way teams play defense; players just have to stand in different places. It’s a lot harder to say to offensive players, “stop hitting line drives up the middle or to your pull side. They don’t work anymore.”

So while the change might slightly undermine the purity of the game, it still makes sense for baseball to do something. And the “infielders must stay in the infield” rule is a nice, balanced solution to the problem. Teams will still get to shift, but it’ll get rid of the roving second or third baseman in short right field, who can mine outs from of a large swath of batted balls that, let’s face it, really should be hits.

One source in Stark’s feature makes an interesting point: the “infielders on the infield” rule does incentivize the wrong kind of hitting. It doesn’t encourage balanced approaches at the plate, hitting to all fields and taking the ball where it’s pitched; it lets players know that it’s still fine to swing mightily to the pull side.

That’s true, but the change is still worth it. For one, shifting within the infield will still be allowed, so some pulled batted balls will still turn from hits into outs. But still, to achieve the results that baseball is looking for, the rule makes the most sense paired with another set of reforms: deadening the ball to reduce home runs and moving the mound back to increase contact.

These are almost common-sense proposals. Players respond to incentives, as do the teams who choose which players to pay. If it’s easier to put the ball in play but harder to hit it over the fence — if, in other words, home run swings are more likely to turn into outs, but it’s easier to make contact — players will make more contact and swing for fewer home runs. They’ll hit more line drives and fewer fly balls, which, paired with the “infielders on the infield” rule, will lead to the balls in play that baseball has been looking for.

Of course, this might not work on individual players. Joey Gallo probably won’t change his swing even with a deadened ball. But it would likely work on a league-wide level. If home run swings suddenly became less valuable, teams wouldn’t pay as much for them and wouldn’t draft them as high — which itself would force players to change their offensive approaches.

The shift is one of many topics, in baseball and in life, that benefits enormously from more realistic, pragmatic discussion and less fundamentalism. “No shifts ever” isn’t fair to defenses. “Shifts on every single pitch” makes the game a little less fun than it should be. But there’s a middle ground that keeps things both fun and fair. Along with deadening the ball and moving the mound back, keeping infielders on the infield just might be it.