The Arizona Fall League is only a few games into its five week schedule. The Tigers have some players to follow out there, including top prospects Bryce Rainer and Zyhir Hope, infielder John Peck, hard-throwing relief prospect Jalen Evans, along with starting prospect Win Scott. We’ll be updating their progress weekly throughout the Fall League season. However, the most interesting note from the fall developmental league is an unannounced experiment with defensive positioning for outfielders.
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Fall League is generally designed to provide competition and development for prospects who missed time during the regular season. At times, players will go out there even when they didn’t miss much time if there’s something specific, like a positional change, that they’re working on. The Fall League has also been used as a laboratory for a lot of rule changes the league has implemented over the last few years.
Banning extreme infield shifts started as a Fall League experiment, as did the pitch clock and the ABS challenge system. MLB uses it as a testing ground, and other rule changes, like checked swing challenges, have been tried but not implemented in the major leagues, or anywhere else in the minor leagues. At least not yet.
Eric Longenhagen of FanGraphs is out covering the AFL and reported today that the league is experimenting this season with restricted positioning for outfielders this time around. You should read his full description, and the league’s response to his inquiries here. Essentially though, they seem to be experimenting with forcing corner outfielders to stay within a certain distance of their respective foul lines, while playing relatively shallow as well.
It was back in 2023 that MLB decided to limit shifts for infielders, requiring all of them to stand on the dirt until the pitch is delivered, and stopping the second baseman and shortstop from shifting to the other side of second base. These changes haven’t had any noticeable effect on ground balls going for hits.
One would assume that the league wouldn’t have implemented the shift limits if they didn’t at least work in the AFL, but that’s just an assumption, as it hasn’t changed the amount of ground balls going for hits in the big leagues. Perhaps teams simply positioned their first baseman a little more toward second base or slightly deeper to help make up the difference. Maybe they started favoring defensive ability as a bigger part of their first base equation. Whatever the league thinks up, teams and players are going to adapt.
The overarching issue the league can’t seem to solve to its satisfaction is the strikeouts. They would do well to stop bothering to try. Teams, notably the Tigers among them, have gotten a lot better at training batspeed with their hitters. With that is likely to come a greater emphasis on contact hitters. If you know you can build light hitting contact guys into major leaguers with at least average raw power, then contact is going to become a lot more valuable commodity in the draft, and that might be the only antidote to the reign of swing and miss stuff around the game. The Tigers already have Kevin McGonigle and Max Clark in this vein, and teenaged shortstop prospect Jordan Yost and others might follow suit in time.
Young players in top shelf high school competition and in college are already seeing velocity that would’ve blown the hair of major league hitters back years ago. It’s going to take time to see if the younger crop of hitters coming up is better suited to put more balls in play. Instead of drafting pre-fabricated sluggers with major swing and miss issues, teams might be able to take light-hitting young players with elite hand-eye coordination and bat control into more power threats, keeping power in the game while also getting some ways toward defeating the tyranny of the whiff.
My only point here is that everything the league does to manipulate outcomes and increase offense has failed, and the sharpest teams quickly adapt and exploit changes. Sticking outfielders close to the foul lines would certainly be a much more difficult change to deal with from a pitching and defensive standpoint. Of course, so would simply making outfielders play without gloves. You want old school? We can go all the way back. This kind of thing can get silly in a real hurry.
The shift bans did nothing of note. Forcing pitchers to abandon their sticky substance of choice didn’t help offenses. Nor did the pitch clock. Nor has the ABS system. The league says they want more offense, but since they dejuiced the baseball, they don’t want crazy home run numbers and a full, three true outcomes, style of game either. What they really want is fewer strikeouts, and nothing they’ve tried has been remotely successful. Trying to manipulate defenses to allow more balls in play to go for hits is just gimmicky in my book, but more importantly it just hasn’t done any good, and probably won’t unless they go to some real extremes.
So far, this is very much just the experimental phase of any changes to outfield positioning. Probably we’ll see them experiment with some different ideas in the next few years. Maybe nothing will ultimately come to pass. The question is still just what people actually want to see, and how any of these things can actually accomplish what the league seems to want to accomplish when so many competing changes are going on all at the same time. We’ve seen more stolen bases with the bigger bases in use, and stolen bases are great action plays. Won’t that lead to prioritizing catcher defense over offense? There’s always a reaction. We might add stolen bases, but cut into catcher offense due to greater demand for arm strength and accuracy.
Personally, I would like the league to just chill out for a while and see how teams and players adapt to the enormous amount of changes they’ve already made. Throw in the varying springiness of different batches of baseball, and the league has created all sorts of little mini eras over the last decade. Comparing say, Justin Verlander’s career to Cy Young’s, is already kind of impossible. In the future, all this artificial manipulation of game elements is only going to add more and more layers of complexity to those sorts of evaluations.
We’re only four seasons from the National League adopting the designated hitter full-time. Now we have shift bans, bigger bases, pitch clocks, sticky stuff checks, the three batter minimum rule for pitchers, the Pitchcom system, the ABS challenge system, and a planned checked swing challenge system coming soon. There was a time when replay was controversial. Rapidly changing rulesets have come fast and furious ever since.
Some of these changes have been positive, and some haven’t, and we might all have different views as to which is which. There’s nothing wrong with experimenting in the Arizona Fall League or in the independent leagues, looking for ways to improve the game. It would just be nice to have a moratorium at some point so we can actually let things play out. Give teams time to study things and adapt and innovate on their own. The Brewers more than anyone, but the Rays as well, started bunting way more often this year. Maybe that will be part of the equation as well. Baseball often provides its own adaptations and counter balances if we just give it time, but it still looks like the league intends to keep trying to manipulate the game to make it look the way some in MLB committees want it to look. We can only hope for a point at which the players are allowed to just play the same game for a few years. They might come up with better, or at least more organic solutions, but only if there is finally an era with some consistency.
