Rob Manfred's Idea to "Fix Baseball" is Dangerous and Willfully Dense

New MLB Commish Rob Manfred enjoying the smell of his hands
Source: Hardball Talk

Today Rob Manfred officially took over as the MLB commissioner, ending the reign of The Lich King Bud Selig, who has ruled the land since 1992. Bud oversaw the players strike, he saw Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa using steroids to save baseball, then he decried their use and wanted the game “cleaned up.” Now he’s 80 and retired, and set to make $6 million a year to sit around and be old.

His replacement is Rob Manfred, and if lazy Wikipedia research tells me anything, it’s that Manfred joined MLB’s circle as an attorney for the owners in the labor strike. It’s not surprising, then, that after he became MLB’s COO, he was going to be Selig’s successor.

And that happened today, there was no last second change of heart from the commish, he’s riding off into the sunset. The problem is with Manfred. In an interview with ESPN’s Karl Ravech, he said the following:

“The second set of changes… [is] related to injecting additional offense into the game. Things like, for example, eliminating shifts.”

Wait, what? Ravech asks him if he’s really planning on eschewing the “forward-thinking, SABRmetric defensive shifts,” and Manfred responds with a head nod.

“That’s what I’m talking about, yes.”

“Let’s eliminate them?” Ravech asks. The new commissioner again nods his head in the affirmative.

The MLB commissioner believes that defense is killing the game, then. He wants massive slugfests and higher scores. This might be one of the more egregious stances a commissioner can take when it comes to admitting that defense is a key part of the game, too. He’s basically stating that it’s unfair for the mean defendermans to play well and stop the valiant hitters from fulfilling their God given right to hit the ball in the exact same spot repeatedly. Let’s not coach hitters to beat the shift… that would be too hard. Let’s just stop the arms race between offense and defense right here.

Manfred is proposing a unilateral SALT Treaty. The defense can no longer build up their armaments and respond to the hitters. Instead they must sit idly by as the batters become better and better. They must impotently stand by as hitters hit the ball to the exact same spot, every time. A spot that’s in their no-fly zone.

What, instead? They add white chalk outlines to the field? What if a defender leaves that box? Does it qualify as a ball? A balk? On a hit, does it become a ground rule double? That is artificial inflation of hitting statistics.

It’s profoundly idiotic, but Commissioner Manfred thinks it’s exactly what the game needs. Except it isn’t. I took a quick look at fangraphs.com, and pulled up the league BABIP (batting average on balls in play) for the last decade. It hasn’t appreciably changed in the last decade, including after the defensive shifts have taken over and ruined the game. It’s stayed comfortably between .295 and .303, with the median and mode both being .297 and the average being .298. That means that it’s been pretty much .297 for the last decade. If defensive shifts were causing the suppressed run-scoring environment that is blooming, then it would bear out in these numbers. It would show that the shift is making outs where there were previously hits. The batting average on balls in play would decline. Oddly enough, it went up in 2014 (just slightly).

What, then, is the problem? Well, batting average is down because a lot of players flail at garbage and pitchers are getting better and better at making sure that they throw enticing-looking garbage. The pitchers are currently winning the offense vs. defense arms duel and instead of, I don’t know, making the hitters better, the new commish wants the pitchers & defense to play with one hand tied behind their collective back.

I hope this is the only bad idea this commish has, he has some good ones (pitch timers, for example), but this is just pant-on-head silly and willfully dense as to what’s actually going on in the game. This could be a dangerous reign for Major League Baseball, which is a scary thought considering the last commissioner almost destroyed the game.