Lies. Everything the Mets do is gold. GOLD.

Purely used Brewers and Mets as example names. For all I know the Mets have a .250 average and the Brewers a .350.

I 100% stand by my satirical comment.

didnt you see him bash the cherry tree with the big bat? thats the answer right there know'wuh'm'sayin?

well that may be true with all sincerity, however the "dangers" or problem I see with using the shift is that baseball now shifts more into a defense vs. hitting game than pitching vs hitting. If we accept the first notion, then the shift is fine. However, with the second one, by using shifts, especially extreme ones, its put a greater emphasis/stress on defense by expanding the distance from the batters box. Therefore, harder hit balls are expected not only from the hitter, but from the pitcher's end as well. In that case, you're not expecting pitchers as much to induce such weaker contact compared to a slight to no shift at all by replacing it with an extreme shift. And if that's the case, pitchers sometimes get more credit for an out than they deserve, whereas defense played a greater role than before. It's as if you're sometimes hoping for the pitcher to make a "mistake" from a hard grounder or line-drive to get an out. This then, is not how pitchers should be trained or expected to get outs if baseball is to be more of a pitching vs hitting game. True good pitching includes generally includes strikeouts and "weak" outs. You can get outs from hard line drives and fly balls, but preferably a pitcher would rather induce weak contact. Extreme shifts essentially teach pitchers to do the opposite of this, and true, while it may work, that's now because there's a greater emphasis on defense/good placement than good pitching as a result of weaker contact. So again, I feel it is or can be effective because of good defensive strats, not necessarily good pitching. And at the very least, if the extreme shifts continue, I would ban shifting up the center for an infielder. When a hitter hits something up the middle its the result of near to perfect timing, not too early, not too late, yet somehow the hitter is punished (linedrives flyballs are okay in my book) and the pitcher gets more credit for the out than he deserves. In fact hitters are taught to hit it back up the middle, and for such perfect timing for such a difficult sport, I don't think that should be punished.

Brian Costello Wrong

No it doesnt. The stats show shifting hasnt done anything good nor bad. It hasnt changed shit.

Yeah the shift works but not nearly as wall as people think, they need to start applying it to way less people, but yeah as a Giants fan i've seen the shift constantly fuck over Belt.

@Jonathan McCully when you get poo pooed on

true - a couple tony gwynns, an ichiro and a mega-bonds could account for that increase ( or could it? ) either way good point

i think self loathing hurt adam dunns career the most lol

quite an important stat to leave out eh? ironic considering he is bashing analytics lol

not trying to cause an argument or judge you, but he left out babip of overshift plays vs non overshift plays. we have no comparison to work with and conclude anything. also, the average of the players being overshifted on isnt mentioned. why overshift a .240 player with 10HRs that isnt known for incessantly pulling the ball? would you overshift a .340 player who slaps the ball everywhere and hits no home runs? or would you overshift the guy batting .220 who hits 50 home runs and pulls the ball? there are so, so many factors left out in this that to come to a conclusion and assume mr ripken ( who i respect ) is "clobbering the arrogant nonsense" of literal mathematicians. theoretically, the entire league can adopt a "slap the ball in the hole" play style except for 10% of people who still pull and get overshifted on - there would be a tremendous difference ( makes sense, albeit an outrageous hypothetical situation ). the overall babip he is displaying would go way up, meanwhile the overshift on the small percentage of people who pull is still working effectively, making him horrendously, backwardly wrong.

Adam Kingston pitchers are taught to throw outside when there's a shift. I saw a video on it, managers believe that the hitters "can't" hit the ball the other way so that's how pitchers should pitch

I know that but what if you are a lefty who has a nasty slider and you are facing a left handed hitter, I know most MLB pitchers can throw a silder that starts off the plate and comes back but it would be easier to start it down the middle and let it break to the far corner if the plate

I dont like it either but it's unavoidable. Its like when you get gunned down stealing. It works a good amount of the time, but you cant expect it to work all the time.

analytics killed stealing bases :'(. the threat of a stolen base was always exciting, now it gets deployed less than once a game! i understand it, but i miss it

That settles it guys.. Luis Z says it's stupid so go ahead and stop doing the overshift.

john20pb yea bow down bitches

john20pb bro I’m dead

But what if one team has a BABIP of .275? Is it working for them.

dape are they really morons if their ideas are being used widely by all 30 major league teams?

Except he didn't really prove anything. He used the league BABIP in those years and not the BABIP when using shifts. The BABIP when teams are shifting were: 2013: .281 2014: .290 2015: .291 2016: .298 As you can see, the BABIP has jumped up pretty significantly, but they are still below the MLB BABIP Bill stated. However, even with that jump it doesn't prove his point either. Was the jump due to the shift no longer working? Or was it because offense across the board has gotten better since 2013? He found correlated data without bothering to find a causation because he believes it proves his point when it doesn't necessarily prove his point. Plus, analytics in baseball has helped multiple teams win the World Series in the last 15 years, so are the analysts really morons if they are getting the wanted results? Or are you the moron for not wanting analytics around because they are different than how things used to be?

Let examine some prominent saber-analytics-moneyball "geniuses". In the entire time he has been A's GM, Billy Beane has NEVER won a World Series; in fact Oakland has never appeared in a World Series in that time, meaning Beane's team has never won the AL pennant. Go back and examine the A's 2002 Moneyball draft. After Swisher, it was an unmitigated disaster. All of their picks after Swisher and through round 7 were dreadful. Several players were chosen by the A's when Votto was still available. You may say, "Well, the other clubs blew it on Votto also" but those clubs were not promoted by Michael Lewis as the greatest geniuses of all time. The A's, supposedly, knew better. As for sabermetrics, it has had some benefit to baseball but nowhere near the amount its backers claim. I am not against baseball analytics; I am against BS that in many cases does not work. Sabermetrics does have (limited) value, but much of it is useless, silly nonsense.

dape "Sabermetrics have limited value" yet every team in baseball has heavily utilized advanced stats. The A's are not the only team to use sabermetrics, you're out of touch.

dape - so when trying to make your argument better, you choose one team to focus on? And that makes sense to you? No wonder you don't understand analytics in baseball and think they have limited use when many of the World Series in the last 15 years have been won with heavy use of them. What about the Red Sox? Since they hired Bill James as a Senior Advisor in 2003, they have won 3 World Series with very heavy advanced statistics use. The St. Louis Cardinals put in place an analytics department in 2004, and after that season, they have won 2 World Series while going to another one. The Cubs just won a WS and look prime to be serious contenders for the next few years and were built heavily with advanced statistics and sabermetrics. The Giants were always minted as this anti-moneyball/anti-sabermetrics team. However, much of their championship teams were built using advanced statistics to find guys that other teams didn't value highly to fill in holes and provide value outside of their superstars. Sabermetrics and advanced statistics are completely different now than when Moneyball was written. It has evolved to incorporate many things that those early A's team completely wrote off as being unnecessary and counterproductive to a winning team. There is a reason that all 30 teams have some sort of advanced analytics departments now. Advanced statistics are still in it's infancy in a game as long and storied as baseball and they will only continue to expand in the game, and morons like you will continue to gripe about it because you are too dense to actually try and understand the importance of them.

it does.. he didnt compare babip on overshift vs non overshift. he didnt bring up the averages of the players that get overshifted vs those that dont get overshifted. he hasnt made a comparison of the babip of any players or group of players that pull the ball during a time when they did and did not overshift. he failed to account for so many factors that i would look a lot more closely than to trust his overzealous lack of analysis. keep in mind i am a fan and respect mr ripken