But baseball isn't a game where you just turn a slider on that says "shift" and you keep it on all game. Amed Rosario I believe is a 60 power prospect. Sure, there's a very small sample size on his MLB stats, but you're really going to shift your outfield shallow against a guy who can hit it over the outfielder's head? It's not a condemnation of the shift in general, but shifting in that manner lost them the game.
There ya go not sure how to spell it out more than that. Shifting did burn them and did lose them the game because they did it when they should not have. I get your argument that perhaps all 27 of the outs they got were because of shifting, but that can be flipped either way until we argue in circles as it presupposes an argument where outs are
only the result of the defender being in the proper place (which is always correct). However, this is not always due to the manager's configurations.
There is a difference between the
'shift' (as a means of describing the defensive alignment irrespective of managerial tinkering, or which is to say, positing the shift as wherever the fielders are at any given time) and
'shifting' (the manager intentionally placing the fielders in a given spot, when factoring in algorithms, statistics, where the ball is expected to be hit, etcetera.)
In
definition A, the shift will always be correct on an out, and always incorrect when there's a hit (on any non 3TO play, of course
) A driver following the rules will always avoid hitting another car; Unless the other car runs the red light and t-bones them. It isn't the fault of driver A, since they were following the rules of the road. This is your argument and I agree on principle that whenever the defender is in the right spot and catches an out, the shift/defensive alignment was correct.
In
definition B, the shift was intentionally decided by the manager given the output using inputs
he is aware of. A perfectly intelligent baseball manager (say, an AGI), could calculate everything from wind speed, wind pattern, where the ball is expected to land, the weight of the ball, pitcher, and batter before the first pitch is thrown, each fielder's range, and so on. In a perfect world, the manager can always use these and other factors to calculate the exact place to play his defenders to provide the highest probability of getting an out on a non 3TO play.
The problem with this argument, which seeks to elevate the shift as a perfect means of accomplishing that goal, is that baseball to normal humans is much more quantum rather than deterministic. No human or algorithm out there can divine these factors with perfect accuracy (and never will be, because the pitch location, speed, break alone will always be too varied to judge, without factoring in batter reaction time, swing speed, swing angle, launch velocity given some of these factors, etc.) So while a perfect AGI could (and would) shift the defense perfectly, a human manager can't. Which means a human's ability to shift 'correctly' comes down to an inherent grasp of as many controllable and observable factors that he can observe.
Gabe Kapler missed two of the most obvious that even a human should control.
Wind Speed, and
The Batter's Power potential. As I said, I'll give him a pass on the latter, since Rosario is just a 60 power potential (for whatever one scout's opinion is worth here), and AAA stats aren't necessarily translatable. He made the wrong decision in where to place his outfielders given the factors he
should be able to read. It's very easy to dismiss this because 'the shift is always the higher percentage play', but there is an inherent missing word in that sentence: "The
correct shift is always the higher percentage play". Kapler made the
wrong shift because he ignored two important factors (that would've changed the algorithm entirely, were he knowledgable enough to consider these as important) and thus lost his team the game. It does not invalidate the shift because the correct shift is always the correct shift.
To end with the car driving again: Driving at 80 MPH will always get you to Seattle from LA faster than it would driving at 40 MPH. But driving to Seattle in the rain with traffic at 80MPH means you're much more likely to crash and die than ever get there. Even a self driving car would know this and correct, because it has a larger understanding of the multitude factors necessary, not just one.