The original draft of this email was sent to Washington Post sports columnist Barry Svrluga after he partially endorsed a possible Major League Baseball rule change that would limit defensive shifts on predictably pull-hitters. It was copied to several of his Post colleagues and other baseball writers at the Wall Street Journal and ESPN.
Dear Barry,
It isn’t as complicated as you suggest. Baseball rules never have and never should prevent a defense from aligning any way it chooses against any given hitter [“MLB’s shift experiment worth considering,” D1, Mar. 19].
Just because the algorithm geeks who’ve never played the game or so much as kissed a girl keep inventing new complexities that lead to evermore boring, largely action-free, 3.5-hour bullpen wars of attrition, that doesn’t mean shifts are a “problem” that demand another complex “solution.”
The more organic, holistic, real baseball solution requiring no exotic rule changes is simple: high schools, colleges and farm systems must groom true, all-around savvy hitters as opposed to ‘roided, launch angle-obsessed and thus easy-to-predict dopes.
Speaking of dopes, for example, when opponents defend Bryce Harper with three infielders on the right side and one barely on the left side, all he’s gotta do is plunk a serviceable bunt toward third and trot to first. Mind you, such a bunt needn’t be executed with the precision of a Cobb or Robinson or Campanaris bottom-of-the-ninth suicide squeeze into a teacup 16 feet from homeplate. It just has to roll, finesse-free, in more or less the right direction.
After two or three such successful bunts or slap singles to left, perhaps followed by a subsequent steal of second and a run scored, opponents would likely rethink their shift. Problem solved.
We don’t need to keep over-thinking the game just because we’ve foolishly let a few toothpick-counting savants from MIT and Cal Tech talk us into doing so for the past 15-20 years. It’s time to Just Say No to new rules and new nonsense. Let’s get back to the perfectly exciting baseball fundamentals that made the game America’s pastime. If a guy making $32 million a year can’t occasionally roll or slap one the other way to keep the defense honest, he ought to be washing cars someplace or selling insurance with his dad.
Yours,
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.