Red Sox legend Fred Lynn ponders MLB lockout, change ban

Should Major League Baseball ban this change, or should fans learn to beat it?

In baseball, field shifting is a method of trying to stop the giants by move position of players in the field to where a particular hitter most often sends a baseball. Attackers don’t like it, for obvious reasons.

The question of whether change should exist has been raised for decade, but it can be said that this is not the biggest problem of MLB at the moment. If the federation and players’ unions fail to come to an agreement by today (February 28), MLB has decided that the regular season will be delayed and any missed matches will not be compensated. .

However, in the past three months without baseball (course begins December 2), the idea of ​​banning change has been one of the very few topics of conversation, as the lockdown prevents major league deals, freelance agency contracts, even team-player contact.

Last week, Joey Gallo, the Yankees slugger, complained about the change, which led to chaos on Twitter:

Of course, Gallo must have been very upset when he complained about this change, as he led MLB to 213 goals last season. He’s one of only two players to have more than 200 hits, and it’s hard to take him seriously when he doesn’t put the ball in the net more than any other player.

The most regrettable pain came from former Boston Red Sox legend and Anaheim Angels star Fred Lynn, who tweeted about Ted Williams beating change in response to Gallo’s lament.

Lynn also dives into the matter with Boston GlobeDan Shaughnessy’s:

“I also watch baseball,” said the man who hit .331 and was the MVP in his rookie season in 1975. “When I compete, the short-throwers and second-base riders, if they are, If they decide to switch to you, they will wait until the second last person. Now they don’t even disguise it. They’re telling you, ‘We’ll give you that, but we’ll take this away.’

“As a hitter, I had to adjust. They won’t adjust their defensive play if you just do the same thing. I can hit the ball into the screw and my exit speed is good, great, but they are worse.

“I had to adjust my thinking. There’s a big hole over there, so what if I go the other way? What’s happening is on the hitter. It really is like that. Learn how to achieve things beyond speed in a different way. Bunt.

It must be a learning process. You have to teach yourself to go the other way. How do you do it? You practice it. You can get in the cage and flip that machine up pretty quickly.

“I was a dead rickshaw driver before I went to Fenway Park. It’s literally polished before it reaches the disc. To go the other way, you put your hand in… you hold it so the barrel stays in the hit area for a longer period of time. That’s one foot of coverage. Just make contact and the ball will shoot to the left. You can make that adjustment, but it takes some work. ”

Lynn also made sure to include a little digging into the key:

Should MLB ban shifts?

Change has taken place in various forms over the past century. At the end of the dead-ball era in the early 1920s, those on the pitch were trying to get a handle on Cy Williams, the National League’s version of Babe Ruth who had played for the Chicago Cubs and Philadelphia Phillies.

A 1927 newspaper cut out of Constitution of Atlanta read,

“There is Willie Keeler who said:

‘Hit’ them where they don’t go. ‘ It’s about what Cy Williams does. The opponent’s defense practically shifted to the full right as Cyrus advanced and he continued to aggressively run his home runs. He took the No. 10 spot recently, putting him ahead of the entire National League. ”

However, the shift became more prominent in baseball discussions during the 1946 season, when Cleveland’s manager Lou Boudreau was desperate to stop All-Star Williams, as did the Reds. s. Louis, who won the World Series from the Sox that year.

Shift not working; Williams leads the MLB in runs scored (142), walks (156), based (.497) and missed (.667) percentiles, OPS (1.164), OPS+ (215) and totals base (343). He was the MVP of that year’s American league.

In 150 games that season, Williams made just 44 appearances. In his 19-year career, he has never successfully shot more than 64 times.

Of course, the game Gallo plays today is different from the game Teddy Ballgame used to know; Attacks are common these days and the strategy is all or nothing. But if the MLB players want to ban shifts, the MLB Head Strikeout is probably not the best person to command.