Debate over baseball’s current defects offers many life lessons

WASHINGTON » It is a prudential axiom: If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. This reflects the awareness that things can always be made worse. With baseball’s AllStar Game at hand tonight amid lamentations about several semibroken aspects of it, it is time to amend the axiom: Don’t fix it even if it is broken.

The itch to fix complex systems often underestimates the ability of markets, broadly understood, to respond and adapt to incentives. So, even if you are uninterested in baseball, read on, because the debate about some of the game’s current defects contains lessons about lesser things than baseball, meaning everything else.

Today’s all-or-nothing baseball is too one-dimensional. There are too many strikeouts — for the first time in history, more than hits, a lot more. And the number is increasing for the 13th consecutive season. Also, too many of the hits are home runs. It was imprecise for Crash Davis (Kevin Costner’s character in “Bull Durham”) to say that strikeouts are “fascist,” but he was right that they are “boring,” at least in excessive quantities. So are home runs. In about onethird of today’s at-bats, the ball is not put in play (home run balls are put in the seats). Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci notes that by the end of June there were “more strikeouts in half a season than there were in the entire 1980 season.” And “on average, you have to wait between balls put in play — 41 seconds longer between movement than 20 years ago.” Steals (hence pitchouts), sacrifice bunts, hit-and-run plays — interesting things for fans — are becoming rarer.

This is not the main reason attendance is down. But the all-ornothing style is not helping, and it is encouraged by the exponential increase in the use of defensive shifts — from 2,357 in 2011 to a projected 36,000 this season.

The best-known early use of the shift, in 1946, overloaded the right side against Ted Williams, who regally said they could not put the shift high enough. Today, the 99.999 percent of players who are lesser hitters elevate their bats’ “launch angles,” exacerbating the all-or-nothing style.

Also, shifts cause pitchers to target a particular part of the plate in order to increase the probability that the batter will hit into the shift. This results in more walks, which batters like because high on-base percentages are rewarded: Today, baseball’s compensation system is an incentive for walks, and for equanimity about striking out, if home runs are frequent.

Information has produced all this: Particular hitters have particular tendencies; defenses adjust accordingly. But for the moment, information is making offense anemic. So, there is a proposal afoot — this is fascism — to ban shifts, to say there must be two infielders on either side of second base, or even that as the pitch is delivered all infielders must be on the infield dirt. This would leave some, but much less, ability to manage defenses. It would, however, short-circuit market-like adjustments.

The market is severely meritocratic, so some hitters who cannot modify their tendencies and learn to discourage shifts by hitting away from them might need to consider different careers.

Baseball resembles a market system because constantly evolving strategies create demands for different tactics, and thus different skills, which are then supplied by different persons and teams. Before restricting managers’ and players’ interesting choices by limiting shifts, give the market — freedom for fan-pleasing ingenuity and adaptation — a chance.