Anybody who follows baseball will admit that, while it has its moments, defense is without a doubt the least glamorous part of America’s pastime. On the surface, defense isn’t accompanied by the drama that hitting regularly is, and it doesn’t seem to require the specialized skills that pitching does. But it’s also no secret that baseball teams with poor defenses are on a collision course for failure, as a team’s ability to make proper — and sometimes extraordinary — plays on batted balls is directly correlated to success.
Recent MLB seasons, and the current 2016 campaign in particular, have witnessed fundamental alterations in defensive ideologies as teams come to terms with just how much of an impact defensive adjustments can make. For example, as of May 24 the Seattle Mariners had defensively saved 15 runs by properly and efficiently making use of defensive shifts. But shifts (which are far and away the most common defensive modification that teams make) are beginning to run somewhat rampant, to the point where many baseball pundits — including MLB commissioner Rob Manfred — are talking about potentially banning shifts. And while there doesn’t seem to be much support for the illegalization of shifts, an incident this past weekend certainly doesn’t lend credence to large-scale defensive change.
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In a rematch of last year’s National League Division Series, the Los Angeles Dodgers took on the New York Mets from May 27th-29th in Queens. The most important thing to come out of the series, though, was an accusation by the Mets directed at the Dodgers stating that they “wanted to use markers on the playing surface to define the desired positions for their outfielders.” The Dodgers had used a laser rangefinder to meticulously determine where players should arrange themselves for a given opposing batter (which MLB does allow) and were then going to mark the Mets’ outfield accordingly so that Dodgers’ outfielders were in the correct place at all times. Unsurprisingly, marking a field is not condoned by MLB.
The illegality of markers on fields, though, does not take away from the impact that technology, such as a laser rangefinder, has on defense. A rangefinder can be used under complete sanction by MLB as long as its results are not utilized to cheat, for lack of a better word. There is nothing wrong with outfielders having a general notion of where they should be to maximize their defensive capabilities against a particular hitter, but giving outfielders the opportunity to perfectly position their defense based on statistics– as the Dodgers were attempting to do — is understandably not okay. The Dodgers-Mets incident has once again proved that technology is king in baseball, but must be kept in check — especially in a time where teams are trying to gain whatever advantages they can on every side of the ball.