Shifts are why baseball needs more teams like the St. Louis Cardinals of the 1980s
The St. Louis Cardinals went against the grain in the 1980s, bucking the offensive trend of the time that called for assembling powerful lineups that resembled slow pitch softball teams more closely than the major league players of 50 years earlier.
To casual fans, it seemed almost laughable that St. Louis thought it could stand up to teams like the slugging New York Mets and Los Angeles Dodgers of that era. But clubs of well-rounded and capable players were remarkably successful when they exposed the weaknesses of the all or nothing players they faced.
Everything that’s old becomes new again. In another era when sluggers rule the baseball landscape, defenses have gotten desperate and it’s changed the way the game is played. Power hitting clubs have refused to bow even as opponents field radical defenses with three — or sometimes even four — infielders on one side of the diamond. As offensive players have enabled defenders to take away their bread and butter, clubs have become even more bold in their tactics. The Pittsburgh Pirates plan to use a defensive alignment with four outfielders and three infielders, they announced last week. We’ve played around with this defensive shift fad for far too long. It’s time for another offensive revolution to put an end to the shift nonsense and return baseball to being the varied and unpredictable.
Manager and team architect Whitey Herzog was mocked when he built his Cardinals teams, clubs that routinely finished last in the major leagues in home runs hit. But he laughed it off saying that speed, unlike slugging hitters, never slumped. It’s hard to find the sort of speed the Cardinals had in those days today. But that doesn’t mean that, like Whitey’s teams did 35 years ago, a change in tactics can’t put the opposition on its heals.
The only way for teams to get away with shifts is to let them. People from fans in the stands to managers in the dugout will justify Matt Carpenter hitting a ball into the shift because he has a CHANCE to hit a home run that way. Herzog’s clubs sacrificed the gamble of hitting a ball over the fence to accept what the defense gave him. The reason it paid off is because the game changes when suddenly there is a man on base. Fielders have more responsibilities to cover. That opens holes to hit through and runs take a little bit more work than one swing to produce. But offense becomes about execution as opposed to an elite skill.
Any team that allows a club to play with four outfielders and three infielders against it deserves what it gets. If there is no one on the left side of the infield, take the free hit the other way and force the opposition to deal with the consequences. Then the first baseman has to hold the runner, opening up a hitting lane on the left side, either the shortstop or the second baseman has to be close enough to convert a double play or to cover the bag on an attempted steal, so more space opens up.
A lot of people think the home run is the most interesting play in baseball. While it is dramatic, putting all of its eggs in the home run basket has made baseball as boring as watching batting practice for three hours in a row. We need to get back to the doubles, triples and even the singles. We need to get back to stolen bases and take the hit and run off the endangered species list. And it all starts with players losing their sense of false pride built on the stubbornness of refusing to change no matter what the other team does to try to stop them. If you’re playing football and the other team puts eight men on the line to stop the run, are you going to keep running or are you going to take advantage and call a pass play? That’s where we are.