Count me as somebody that would love to see the shift go away. I just think it should come the natural way which is batters exploiting it.
Instead of banning the shift, they should create a rule in which any pitch having a velocity of over 95 mph or a spin rate of over 2900 rpm is treated as a HBP awarding the hitter 1B. This would give us a lot more offense and would allow starters to throw many more complete games like in the old, old days. They should also deaden the bats so even the most powerful hitters top out at like 105 mph exit velo. No more homers!
I think that is the easy, straight-forward part. Somehow keeping offensive production from imploding once you take away homers is the real challenge. Shrink the infield so that it's substantially harder to get fast guys out at 1B on ground balls? Only allow 8 fielders? Something very dramatic would need to be done as banning shifts is going to hardly move the needle at all.
Gloves have gotten too large -- Honus Wagner held down shortstop with a child-size mitten. What makes Correa so special that he needs all that webbing? Hell, ole Mordecai Brown didn't even need 5 fingers. If we want more offense, let's cut one finger off the throwing hand of each pitcher when they join A-ball.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/looking-place-blame-mlb-lockout-110000067.html What??? Freaking Ranger fans.... From The Fort Worth Star: Looking to place blame for the MLB lockout? You can start with the Houston Astros
Satire page Quick Summary: I thought it was going to be about tanking and the copycat league watching the Astros success, but no. It focused on the Astros cutting player development costs (back when they got rid of a bunch of scouts in favor of analytics plus dropped Greeneville affiliation) and the league following suit by contracting minor league affliliates.
Players need to sign this, the owners have moved big time on the money issues the players have said they weren’t negotiating on and that final layer of tax would affect the Dodgers and Mets and that’s about it Sign the damn deal
That is an imminently fair offer by MLB. They seem to want to get a deal done and play 162 more than break the union which comes as a surprise to me. mid they want to get hung up on the third surcharge at roughly 300 million they can go **** the selves and die in a fire. I had predicted 225-230 as the range of the luxury tax in the first year so looks like I nailed that. Players counter with 230 and 50 million in the pool and call it a day. The surcharge really isn’t the owners being greedy- it is about competitive balance. The players should like that too, more or less. It’s basically 1 more big deal- total- league wide at the end of the day we are talking about. To avoid big market teams dominating with payrolls 6x over other payrolls should be worth it to everyone involved.
