CLEVELAND, Ohio — Indians skipper Terry Francona still does not like the idea of changing baseball’s rules to limit infield shifts in an effort to boost offense, but he could soon be in the minority among Major League Baseball managers when it comes to that position.
Speaking to reporters via Zoom on Friday, Francona said in a perfect world, the game would evolve organically.
“By that I mean not telling people they can’t shift, but players going back to learning how to use the whole field and put the ball in play more,” Francona said. “That leads to more baserunners, which leads to some more base running, which I think everybody likes.”
The renewed push for regulating how defenders can deploy against a hitter in the field is gaining support among managers around the league.
Miami’s Don Mattingly, the National League Manager of the Year in 2020, told MLB Network on Friday that he would not be totally against the idea of changing the rules in order to free up some space for hitters.
“Obviously we’d have to look at what qualifies as a ‘shift’ first,” said Mattingly, who eventually went on to lament the state of offense in the game.
“It’s sad that we have to get to that. But I would not be against anything that creates more action and creates less downtime. We’ve got to find a way to make our game move. And I don’t mean faster games, I mean more action.”
The problem, as Mattingly sees it is one that’s tied directly to the percentage of balls being put in play. And that percentage keeps dropping at an alarming rate.
Since 2012, major league plate appearances that end with a ball being put in play have slipped by nearly five percent. Additionally, strikeouts have jumped from more than 36,000 in 2012 to just short of 43,000 in 2019, the most recent 162-game season.
| Year | % of PA ending with ball put in play | Strikeouts |
|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 71.4 | 36,426 |
| 2014 | 71.1 | 37,441 |
| 2016 | 69.8 | 38,982 |
| 2018 | 68.2 | 41,207 |
| 2020 | 66.1 | *60-game season |
Francona says the best way to encourage offense is to have players make their own adjustments. He says artificially managing shifts gives batters an incentive to try even harder to pull the ball.
“Players aren’t going to try to hit the ball the other way,” Francona said. “They don’t have to because you can’t shift. So, they’re going to just reach back for more and everybody’s going to pull the ball.”
Aligned right: Major League Baseball’s infield shift trend has roots in Cleveland
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Simply banning shifts won’t solve the problem. The whole issue should be part of a larger conversation about injecting offense into the sport. Regulating shifts and leaving it at that is not likely to produce the desired result of more traffic on the bases. The strike zone and mound distance also have to be part of the conversation.
Both of those areas were probed by experimental rules in the Atlantic League back in 2019 when the league moved its pitching rubber back two feet and utilized an electronic strike zone for parts of that season. But both moves made baseball purists bristle. Baseball’s rules are a sacred cow that have some pretty zealous defenders.
But altering rules to aide offense is hardly a novel approach in professional sports. The NBA outlawed zone defenses prior to the 2001-02 season. In the late 1970s the NFL allowed linemen more freedom to use their hands while blocking to give quarterbacks more time to throw the ball down field.
Both leagues flourished because of the changes.
The misconception is that rule changes are some kind of attack on the purity of the sport. Changes are made by executives whose objective is to increase attention — and thereby revenue — for the game. It’s when certain rules are held sacrosanct as they are in baseball that a crisis can develop.
And that’s what baseball is facing right now. It’s not a crisis on par with the COVID-19 pandemic by any stretch, but with the massive financial losses brought on by the lack of fans in the stands, it is nonetheless a contributing factor.
The ball is not being put in play enough. Hitters have developed all-or-nothing approaches at the plate. Strikeouts are up, and players that strike out 125+ times in a season are still viewed as valuable as long as they hit 30+ home runs. Games last too long, and instead of addressing the root of the problem, remedies such as pitch clocks and three-batter minimums are put in place as band-aid measures.
Telling a team how it must deploy defenders against a hitter goes against just about everything managers such as Francona believe in. But it might be too late to merely trust that hitters can turn the tide on their own. If that means the rules have to change, then maybe it’s time.
Meanwhile, Francona will continue sticking up for the playing the game the way it’s been played for more than 120 years.
“One thing we need to do better, as an industry is make people understand just how much we love our game and enjoy our game and not just pick apart the things that we don’t like in our game,” Francona said. “I don’t think we always do that really well.”
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