An article on mlb.com yesterday talked about a college team in the early 90s who was the first to implement what is now commonplace, the dramatic defensive shift in baseball.
And it led to thinking how baseball has come full circle.
Oberlin College in Ohio had a terrible baseball team. It was so bad that the head coach was the football coach and the assistant coach was the basketball coach, and both admitted they knew very little about baseball.
After years of getting pounded game after game, they decided to totally revolutionize baseball.
In order to put an end to the doubles and triples their pitchers were doling out like ice cream at a kids birthday party, the “braintrust” created a new defensive alignment called the Flytrap (to “trap” fly balls).
They had five outfielders—and this is the honest-to-goodness truth: a left guard (who played near the left field foul line), a left rapper (in the gap), a rover (moved to fill the outfield holes), a right gapper and a right guard.
Gone, was the unnecessary infield. It was replaced by a sweeper, who stood halfway between second and third, and a stud, who stood halfway between first and second.
The gentleman throwing the ball was point. The catcher was now the sweep.
It quickly turned into a disaster. Because—and this is something opposing Division III coaches learned quickly but for some reason some twenty-five years later major league players can’t quite grasp—every batter just bunted. Once they got to first, with that stupid defensive alignment, they just stole second and then third.
After getting pummeled in their remaining games using this ridiculous defensive scheme, Oberlin College dropped it. Their head coach went back to football. Their assistant coach went back to basketball.
The point of all of this is, people who know nothing about baseball are always trying to improve it, and end up ruining it.
Like today.
Two days ago, Rangers pitcher Lance Lynn was observing how much analytics, which are run by people who have no idea what baseball is, have changed baseball. He said he used to try to be efficient with his pitches, rely strongly on the sinker, get batters to hit the ball into the ground for an easy groundout.
But that’s apparently bad baseball. Now, all they want him to do is go for the strikeout. Defense is unimportant. They are there to just hit home runs.
And never mind that this approach means pitchers will have to throw more pitches. Pitchers are commodities. Once one has used up its allotment of pitchers, move onto the next one.
You can easily see a day when there really needs to be only one defensive player on a team. You move him around the infield and shallow outfield according to where the data suggests the ball will be hit, in the unlikely event the batter hits it. He fields the ball and throws it to the appropriate home run hitter wearing a glove whose only job is to catch it and step on a base, in the unlikely event someone hits a pitch and the ball doesn’t go over the fence.
Yes, unbeknownst to itself, Oberlin College started a trend. Baseball run by people who don’t know, or care, what baseball is.
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