A Simple Idea for MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred That Has Nothing to Do with Defensive Shifts

The one underlying theme Manfred’s missives is trying to get younger people more engaged with baseball. The Times story notes he uses two iPads and an iPhone, a stark departure from Bud Selig, a man who gave the impression as commish of using a 10-pound rotatory phone to conduct vital affairs. If nothing else, Manfred is a man of the times unafraid of looking forward.

Ken Rosenthal detailed a bunch of more changes Manfred is considering, including lowering the mound, adjusting the strike zone and moving fences in.

However in the last couple days the focus in the online baseball community seems centered on two parts of Manfred’s talks: potentially banning defensive shifts to help spur offense and enforcing a pitch clock/measures to speed up the game. Baseball, which has been around for parts of three centuries seems to continually have these crisis of identity in the Internet era. A little something annoys people — offense dropping off in 2014 to 4.07 runs per game, the 28th-lowest total in the last 115 years per FanGraphs — and then everyone rushes off to figure out ways to tweak the game retroactively. (And then it’s debated to the point of nausea, often in circular fashion.)

Do defensive shifts help decrease offense? Yes. Should baseball overhaul its rules to ban them? Probably not.

Why not let the game adapt organically over a period of time or make teams and players adjust? There’s a famous quote attributed to Hall of Famer “Wee” Willie Keller about hitting that goes, “I keep my eyes clear and I hit ’em where they ain’t.” Eventually, the better hitters should figure out ways to adjust to beat the shift. If that means a dead-pull hitter like David Ortiz needs to tweak his swing or start dropping choppers down the third base line to beat the shift, so be it. Sports always have a way of changing, so if teams continue to radically shift the infield alignments, in turn, batters with a larger spray chart who can pepper the ball around the field become more valuable. Or teams will have to run the risk/reward analysis with guys like Mark Teixeira batting .240, grounding into the shift often and hitting the occasional home run.

This isn’t quite and apples-to-apples comparison but remember a few years ago when the Wildcat offense became something every NFL team wanted to run? Eventually, defenses caught up and the game self-corrected itself. Baseball, throughout its long history, tends to go through phases, so wildly reacting to 1-2 years seems a little foolish and perhaps another example of why the timeless sport of baseball isn’t exactly congruent with our modern, go-go, 1.5 second attention span lives. (An argument could be made that’s a positive, too.)

Simply dropping in a rule that you can’t have more than two infielders on either side of the diamond feels counterproductive.

Enforcing time mechanisms to keep the game moving, that’s a more viable idea. Devoting any more than three hours a day 6-7 times a week for a baseball game eats up a lot of your time — even in the casual summer months. Problem here is that baseball’s reported $9 billion in revenues are broadcast-driven. As Keith Olbermann pointed out last summer, are regional sports networks and radio going to stand for it if the rules for pitch times and batters stepping in and out of the box are enforced, thus decreasing the amount of time to sell for on-air promos?

For me, as a 34-year-old devoted, obsessive baseball fan this stuff doesn’t really bother me all to much. The game is the game, for me. Would it be nice if a game was a little shorter? Sure. Do defensive shifts bother me? Eh. Fair is fair and both teams can deploy them if they want. As stated previously, let’s see teams adjust their offensive strategy to get around them and then things will regress back to mostly normal.

The Times article notes that 5.7 million people access the MLB At Bat app, which allows live streaming of television and radio along with play-by-play. The average age is 30. That’s good. As Will Leitch pointed out at Sports on Earth Monday, people who are already dyed-in-the-wool baseball fans don’t fret about things like television ratings or the sport being boring. However getting the next generation of kids — with the attention span of a SnapChat — to get hooked on the game is a challenge, especially given the nature of baseball, where a “star” player only gets 3-4 at-bats a game.

My simple, modest solution: teams ought to consider a special section of $1 or free tickets for every game for families or give away tickets for summer camps or schools or local Little Leagues or whomever. Get people of all ages into the ballpark. The experience of baseball through a television or phone screen isn’t quite the same as at the park and that helps you get hooked.

Attendance in baseball remains strong. In 2014 24 of the 30 clubs averaged at least 25,000 for their 81 home dates. That still leaves plenty of room for inexpensive tickets to get people through the tutnstiles. Yes, the secondary-market like StubHub allows for super inexpensive tickets, but there’s a special, nice feeling you get when you receive “free” tickets or buy them yourself from the box office at cheap price. I’m not a marketing person and logistically I’m not sure how you’d set it up, but the fact is there are always empty seats inside most parks for most games.

Point is, get people of all ages to come out to the park. I know this much: going to a baseball game in the summer is a nice way to spend a day or night. For kids, it’s the excitement of being inside the ballpark, buying cotton candy, hoping to catch a foul ball, the lights, the sounds, the smells, etc. If you’re an adult, there are worse ways to spend your leisure time than with a hot dog and a beer while catching a few rays and heckling the opposing batter.

Although I was already a baseball fan at the time, my first trip to a ballgame came as part of a Cub Scout field trip to Yankee Stadium circa 1986. B.J. Surhoff hit two home runs for the Brewers that day, which is one of the few days in my life I’ll always remember. Memories formed as a child leave a long impression, something baseball ought to tap into rather than whatever gimmick of the moment is floating around to improve the game in the futile attempt to chase television ratings.

If you’re having a good time with your family or friends, soaking up some ray and munching on a bag of peanuts you’re far less worried about whether or not the third baseman is standing in short right field or not.