MLB power agent calls shifts 'discriminatory,' wants major rule change
The pandemic of professional baseball players who cannot execute simple Little League-level baseball skills like bunting or shortening swings and hitting to the opposite field continues to spread like a bacterial plague through the major leagues.
And as defenses continue to execute ever-more comical shifts that inch closer and closer to just lining everyone up along the foul line from plate to pole, more and more people around baseball are blaming the shift and not the hitter.
Enter Scott Boras, who has seen the value of his power-hitting clients, and therefore his cut of their contracts, go down the drain.
Boras hates defensive shifts. When a lot of the guys you represent are pull-hitting feast-or-famine sluggers whose batting averages continue to converge with their home run rates, it’s an understandable reaction.
But this time, the super agent has officially dived into the loony bin head-first.
Boras calls the shift “discriminatory,” saying it unfairly targets left-handed hitters in general and left-handed power hitters in particular, and he now wants to see a rule passed requiring at least two infielders to the left side of second base.
Boras told Jon Heyman of FanCred Sports, “You want right-handed hitters and left-handed hitters treated equally. I think you have to (legislate) having two players on the other side of the (second base) bag.”
Boras estimates that there is a “20-point penalty” for left-handed hitters, though he did not make clear whether he was talking about batting average or some other statistic.
Furthermore, batting averages across Major League Baseball are the lowest they’ve been since 1972, the year before the introduction of the designated hitter.
Part of the decline is just a function of modern baseball. Players strike out more often than ever before, they draw more walks, and station-to-station baseball and strategic hitting are only seen these days on MLB Network when they’re airing some classic game from the distant past.
Indeed, sabermetric types are now starting to view batting average with the same skewed eye they used on RBI a few years ago, preferring on-base percentage and OPS for the layman and advanced stats like OPS+ for the math geeks.
And on some level, they have a point; as sports evolve and “Big Data” types get their mitts on the numbers, we see wholesale shifts in what’s considered valuable.
But the simple fact remains that all legislating the shift will do is to reward incompetence.
There has always been a very simple solution to the shift sitting right in front of big league coaches and players all along.
As soon as left-handed hitters learn how to bunt down the third-base line or shorten their swing and slap a pitch on the outside half into left field for what would be a single normally but could be an inside-the-park home run if they can curl it toward the foul line, you’ll see defenses pull back and this whole silly episode will be over.
Baseball has gone on at a professional level since a group of ringers in Cincinnati played a barnstorming tour for money way back in 1869.
The National Association came from that newfound professionalism in 1871; the National League that still exists today was founded in 1876.
And in a century and a half, baseball has never needed to tell defensive players where to line up because hitters are too incompetent to “hit it where they ain’t.”
Boras doesn’t care about the integrity of the game; he only cares that his cut of the contracts for certain of his clients who can’t hit for beans in 2018 is starting to dry up.
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