I haven't seen the study, but this intuitively makes sense to me. Even in his best years, Pujols was among the league leaders in GIDP. He has always hit a lot of ground balls to the pull side.

I would take the under for virtually any amount of money.

I tend to agree. Pujols's career in STL was amazing -- one of the greatest prolonged peaks for a right-handed hitter in major league history.

Shifting surely ****ed some lefties more than poohole.

some quick math based on average team having a .240 average says 1 more most likely followed by 2.

The shift is what turned ryan Howard from MVP candidate to out of the league, he's easily the most impacted

Can't find the original on fangraphs but here is an aggregator version https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...killed-it/amp/

Of course a few of my examples were stretches, but it makes the point in spades with many of them that are slam dunks. And for each example there is some justification. For instance, Fed wins about 4 majors out of 30 most recently after winning 16 out of 24. And if its 0-for-30, it doesn't tarnish the 16-for-24. Tiger Woods one major in 12 years after 14 in 12 years. Hello. No tarnishments. It's bullshyt to say there is.

Yeah but Fed was still a top 3 player in the world throughout almost all of his 30's. He may only have won 4 out of 30 championships, but he was in many finals and semi-finals and was competing above everybody except 2 guys. Pujols wasn't even a top 300 player after age 35.

You pretty much picked one of the athletes that aged the best that anyone has ever aged in their sport. Pujols aged terribly, and there's plenty of baseball players who have been productive at the ages he wasn't. The fact that you think his post 35 resume is impressive shows you don't understand how poorly he played.

I don't buy it. It probably had some effect, but Howards power numbers went way down, and his walks went way down too. Line drive and ground ball singles weren't a large part of what made Howard great. He might lose 20 points off his batting average, but I highly doubt the shift had more than a minor effect on his success. I highly doubt that the shift directly cost him that much.

Now, indirectly, perhaps it allowed pitchers to pitch to him in a way that would allow him to hit the ball in ways that used to be singles, but no longer were. But a quick look at his stats show he was getting just as many singles later in his career as he was when he was mashing. What disappeared about half of his home runs, doubles, and walks. The strikeouts stayed about the same, as did the singles.

At age 26, Howard hit .313 in 159 games. He had 98 singles.
At age 34, he had .223 in 153 games. He had 85 singles. So maybe the shift cost him 10-15 singles. But at age 26 he had 58 home runs and 108 walks. At age 34 he had 23 home runs and 67 walks. I don't see the shift as being the big factor.

So I think this is more correllation than causation in both the Pujols and Howard cases. David Ortiz and Barry Bonds hit just fine against even more extreme shifts.

The shift probably knocks 20 points off the BA of a guy like David Ortiz. Maybe 30 tops. It doesn't turn Howard and Pujols from superstuds to superduds.

total humiliation in KC

That 538 article mentions Ortiz, possibly bunting against the shift and Howard not wanting to do it, which almost makes it sound like Ortiz overcame shifting against him by dropping down bunts, lol. Easier to beat the shift by hitting it into the seats or at least gaps.
Also pretty stupid to mention that in one of their without-shift sims, Howard finished with like 550 homers. Really honest account of what his career would've likely ended up like without facing shifts there.

The Shift should be BANNED from baseball.

We need more offense and more base hitting. The damn pitchers are already powerful enough I say!

Banning the shift would be stupid. Forcing fielders to stand in less than optimal positioning would just be lol. I'd rather they reduce the number of fielders than do that.

Top of the order every inning would make baseball so much better. Ohtani and Trout just batted, cool, they'll bat again next inning. Much better than waiting an hour while every weak player in the lineup gets their participation medal.

I would also say higher outfield walls and deeper parks, so swinging for the fences stops being the batting style of choice for all but the most powerful of hitters.

Yeah. That article is quite poor. Ortiz's pull percentage was just as high at the end of his career as it was earlier in his career. He didn't beat the shift by making some sort of concerted effort to hit the ball on the ground the other way.

At a very general level, you can gear your swing to pull the ball more often or gear your swing to hit the other way. But it is very, very difficult for a major league hitter to make a conscious decision to either pull the ball or hit the ball the other way in a specific at-bat.

Imagine that you gave every hitter in the major the leagues the following offer: "Over your next 200 ABs, you must increase the percentage of balls you hit the other way by 10 percentage points without increasing your K%. If you succeed, you get $10 million dollars."

How many players would win the $10 million? I'm guessing that it would be less than 5%.

Bigger parks are a good idea. It certainly would rebalance the league between speed and power.

I've long felt that one of the most exciting plays in baseball is the extra base hit. Balls hitting off the wall, being fielded, outfield throws, doubles, triples.

When that ball disappears over the wall, there will be no fielding, throwing, or base-running. The play is over. Speed and defense will not participate in this play.

Make all the 10 foot high walls into 40 foot high walls and keep all the cheap home runs in the park. Cool ricochets and interesting plays would ensue. Much better IMO.

420+ foot home runs are awesome. I'm fine with real bombs. But all those 350-380 footers? I'd rather see speed and defense be part of those plays.

I understand completely how weak he was sabremetrically the last 7 years or so. I also understand that his assault on Aaron and Bonds was impressive past age 35, when most are gone from the league. Legends value as a draw is a huge part of any sport. Stating that Federer aged well is slightly obvious, but that he was way off his peak even so is just as obvious. There are guys on my list that are slam dunks in the comparison. You have to avoid them to avoid the fact that my point stands.

No it wasn't.

If some team was dumb enough to sign him to a 5 year deal now to DH and chase records, and he batted .160 with 20 home runs a year for 5 more years to break all those records, it wouldn't be impressive either. Chasing all time records is only impressive if you're actually contributing to a team in the process.

Pete Rose hits record is silly because the last 5 years of his career he was a negative value player chasing a record while not helping his team. Bonds set the HR record while still being a very good hitter. Rickey Henderson blew away the SB record while still in his prime. Hanging around chasing silly numbers while not playing a quality game isn't impressive. If Randy Johnson had pitched like garbage until he was 53 to break Nolan Ryan's strikeout record it would do nothing for his career.

Any team can sign Pujols for a league minimum contract. We'll see if anyone thinks he's worth a roster spot. I'm always a fan of older players showing they've still got it, but Pujols hasn't been that guy.

As for Federer, it's actually not clear that the tennis he played at 36 was anything less than what he played in his prime. There just happened to be 2 guys that were better than him, that both weren't around in his prime, and were clearly better than anyone who was around in Fed's prime. There's a reason why the GOAT tennis debate is pretty much those 2 guys and Fed. If Fed didn't add those late Majors to his career, he wouldn't be part of that debate anymore. He continued adding to his legacy until age 37.

Fun stat: Pablo Sandoval already has 4 pinch hit home runs this season.

sorry about the 538 article i didn't read it and just assumed it was well put together, i promise you there once was an amazing article advocating ryan howard was killed by the shift on fangraphs, i know this because i tracked down a blog of mine that pulled images and info from it and yet the original doesn't exist

essentially, ryan howard rarely made contact, but when he did, it was hit really hard but to a narrow range of locations, sample size clearly an issue for non shift situations because they only didn't shift him when they had to hold runners

as you can see, the only difference between all star Ryan Howard and terrible Howard was his BABIP, his walk and k rates didn't move much, the only difference was how often he hit safely when he made contact and by then they were shifting on him pretty much every at bat

Bums/Halos combine for 25 runs with only one homer.

The White Sox have allowed two runs over their last four games. The starters haven't allowed any, and 9 hits total. No way. I very much like the idea of a pitcher, a catcher, and 7 defenders.

How would you even ban shifts? Draw circles on the field the defenders would have to be in during the pitch?

Require 2 infielders to be on each side of 2nd when the ball is contacted

I wanna say cricket does something similar to this

This.

Having outrageous shifts is just downright silly.

I disagree. I like that the game allows for full freedom of strategy in where fielders are placed. Makes for such interesting plays in the field too.

Interesting graphic on Howard but I don't still don't buy that the shift did that much to him. His BB rate definitely dropped and his home run rate dropped a lot too. His foot speed dropping as he aged might've cost him a couple of hits a year too. But I'm not buying that the shift cost him anything more than 20 hits per year, and his demise was much bigger than a loss of 25 total bases per 150 games. He was a 1 dimensional power hitter that went from 45 homers per year to 25 homers per year with less walks, I'm not convinced anything other than that was the biggest difference.