Snyder's Soapbox: Lose the defender cheat sheets
Welcome to Snyder's Soapbox! Here, I pontificate about matters related to Major League Baseball on a weekly basis. Some of the topics will be pressing matters, some might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will be somewhere in between. The good thing about this website is that it's free, and you are allowed to click away. If you stay, you'll get smarter, though. That's a money-back guarantee. Let's get to it.
Contrary to the belief of some, Major League Baseball is an excellent product right now. People have been lamenting that "baseball is dying" for well over 100 years -- for real, you can find articles from the early 1900s saying as much -- and it's not even remotely true. Baseball is very healthy. That doesn't mean things couldn't improve.
For example, pitchers are too good. The velocity at which they are throwing stuff that moves just isn't all too fair to today's hitters. There's a relatively long line of former players who love to lament that today's hitters just have terrible approaches. Even if you think the approaches at the plate could be better, it's lunacy to suggest the league batting average sits at .245 instead of, say, .265, based solely on hitter approach. As a friend of mine likes to say, "pitchers are witches."
It isn't just the pitchers, though. The defenders are more athletic and positioned better than ever. Arms at shortstop and third base are better than they used to be, allowing these defenders to play deeper than several decades ago, meaning their range increases on grounders that might've bled through the infield for singles back in the 1970s.
In terms of the positioning, I have one possibly nitpicky complaint. You know those notecard-sized item players pull out of their pocket between at-bats? These are defensive cheat sheets. Teams fill these out for every single hitter on the opposite team. They've studied everything possible about each hitter and have an ideal defensive positioning chart that corresponds to the research. Even without data, it sure feels like players hit the ball hard right at a defender, whether in the infield or outfield, more often these days. Teams are amazing at positioning their fielders.
Again, it might be a nitpick, but couldn't we at least cut this out? See how many defensive players can remember where they are supposed to be for each hitter on the opposing team or at least make the coaching staff try to move them -- old-school style -- from the dugout with hand signals.
Is this petty? Probably. I'm OK with that. The pitchers and defense already have so many advantages in baseball; we don't need them to have the extra layer of an open-book test on defense. Lose the cheat sheets!
