Good win today! Looks like Rodriguez is really starting to put it all together.
Good win today! Looks like Rodriguez is really starting to put it all together.
Erod best game ever ....trade him now !!!! Realmutto
Bottom of the order on base 3 out of 8 PAs.
His best game was the five innings against the Yankees a few weeks back.
What are the MLB rules about shifts? I thought that they were implemented by the team managers and their FO? Was the Lou Boudreau shift against Williams implemented by Lou Boudreau? The shifts really hurt Big Papi much more than Ted Williams since many teams employed it. Only a few teams did it against Ted. Many hitters today are hurt by the shift.
Last edited by CliffKlowers; 05-20-2018 at 10:49 PM.
Because that was never going to happen. There was not ever going to be some wholesale change to trying to go oppos in this league. In the first place its hard to do consistently and in the second place it is entirely contrary to every PR and monetary influence there is on the players. There agents are telling them to hit HR's. We are telling them to hit HR's, the Dead Presidents are telling them to hit more HR's and those three influences trump anything a manager is going to say in this day and age. Then you lump on what the league is doing or not doing in rules changes and it should be obvious that the preponderance of influences and incentives to hit over and not around the shift. The accepted response is to hit over the shift and the juiced baseball surely helps that.
Plus curtailing the shift into something less pervasive would be easy. That they don't do it is tantamount to a admission that players are incentivized and influenced to hit over it and that is exactly how MLB wants it. Hence MLB won't curtail it regardless of how easy it would be. The total number of shifts during each championship season has grown exponentially since Joe Maddon reintroduced the thing in its current form several years ago. We are up to thousands and thousands of shifts per championship season now.