Screensnark Forums

Yeah, I think if your opponent can switch up the field on you like this, then you should be embarrassed that you're incapable of hitting to the opposite side:

It makes sense for Adam Dunn to have retired all the more now

Fielder shouldn't be far behind him.

The Angels started hitting me up to buy season tickets. I go to like two games a year. Lol.

Yeah, the Cubs started hitting me up in November. I think I've gone to more concerts at Wrigley than games the last few seasons... it's cheaper

Bans of defensive shifting is idiotic. Literally every other sport (hockey, football, basketball, soccer, et al) allow a team to deploy its defensive personnel as it wants. Banning it doesn't enhance the watchability of the game, it detracts from it (as it removes an entire layer of strategy and skill to discuss).

Forcing players to play at particular spots also just arbitrarily rewards certain skillsets. Suddenly these players become massively more valuable (and, by comparison, non-shift-able players lose value) for no good reason.

Hockey was bad when the neutral zone trap was deployed en masse by terrible teams. They made it a lot less effective to play by demanding that obstruction penalties be called and changing some rules (repealing the ban on 2 line passes). They didn't outright ban it, but I wouldn't have complained if they did.

Basketball defenses were changed by first banning zone defenses and then by repealing the ban, but limiting how physical you could play man to man defense. Removing the hand check followed by the forearm check outside of the post.

There are reasons to change the rules that defenses have to obey. I don't think the shift in baseball is one of them, but I do think that it's a little outside the spirit and history of the game to have your 3B play short RF. Why not have your RF play short RF if you think that's where the ball is going to be hit?

Abusive defenses, yes. But shifts are neither abusive nor unusual. At best some teams are deploying them somewhat more effectively. Again, the problem with such a rule is that the rule-created world of no shifts IS A DECISION AS WELL, which simply rewards a different set of skills and makes them overeffective.

What a fucking terrible rule. You should be able to distribute your players any way you want. If you are shifting you are leaving a hole elsewhere. WTF? I mean what are they going to do draw lines on the field? And by the way we are talking about a sport which has no standard field dimensions to begin with.

I think the easy fix is for every team to work on bunting in spring. And every time you shift the 3B to short RF you just bunt the ball to 3B. Eventually it will work enough to stop people from doing that.

Part of the reason teams shift now is that players have drifted away from solid fundamental baseball.