Stop Hitting Into The Shift: A Recipe For Avoiding Lockdowns

If you want to make heads explode, bring up the subject of The Shift among traditional baseball followers. The Shift is the defensive configuration now widely employed that places three infielders on one side of the infield to counter a batter’s tendency to hit the ball in that direction.

Seeing a second baseman in short right field gobbling up ground balls that might have been hits— before baseball analytics geeks convinced managers of the data-- has a particularly corrosive effect on many fans.

Why, they ask, does the batter simply not drop down a bunt the opposite way for a sure hit until they adjust the defence? Or, if that’s not macho enough, adjust his swing to send the ball the opposite way rather than into the jaws of a stacked six-man defence? 

Good question. In part, the answer is that home-run hitters get paid huge sums while bunters and singles hitters get minimum MLB salaries. In the old expression, home run hitters drive Cadillacs, singles hitters drive Fords. If you hit the ball over the heads of everyone into the stands 40 times a year, who cares about all those smoked ground balls that get swallowed up? You’re getting paid for homers.

The rational person says let probability work, assuming enough hitters will eventually adjust to the reality of The Shift. However, hitters want to stick with what got them to the majors. They fear change. Something about the look of The Shift makes them unhinged. Naturally, baseball purists want a rule against it NOW! Not for them risk management when aesthetics are involved. They’re like the people who refused to wear seat belts because Henry Ford didn’t install them. Go figure.

The battle over probabilities is seemingly everywhere these days. For example, experts, politicians and their embedded media pals have convinced otherwise sane people that they are death’s door from Covid-19 unless society is entombed in its basement. The decision by the Ontario government— no doubt prompted by their “expert” class— to lock down parks (now rescinded), tennis courts and golf courses to halt the latest mutation of the virus is a prime example.

Lockdowns have had little, if any, positive effect so far on the virus in North America. (They’re actually detrimental to health if employed too long.) But like baseball hitters determined to hit into the shift , the Health Experts® are going to keep employing the lockdown. Hey, who you gonna’ believe? People who hitting .200 on all the major calls of the pandemic or your lying eyes?

A few examples where probability should calm the current panic: In Canada 99 percent of the 86,733 currently infected as of Sunday have mild or no symptoms. One percent of them are serious or critical. Of the 1,027,144 closed cases which had an outcome, two percent were fatal. Ninety-eight percent (1,003,553) recovered or were discharged. 

During the 14 months of the pandemic that equates to 23,591 deaths in a nation that sees approximately 300 thousand people die a year (about 820 a day). But, instead of taking this optimistic outlook, media have concentrated on the outs being made by hitting into the posse of fielders. Why? Because if it bleeds it ledes.

We must save everyone or the strategy is no good. This is Andrew Cuomo’s “What if it was your mother?” gambit. While a compelling humanist argument it is a lousy way to view public policy, where responsibility is to maximize those saved while accepting some losses. 

The meat puppets on TV and social media throw around Cuomo Think the way infielders throw the ball around after a batter makes an out hitting into the shift. As social satirist Bill Maher points out on his HBO show they emphasize the most negative numbers— tests— while playing down or ignoring data that might calm down the petrified populace. Or , worse, they skew data for political purposes.

In a bold (for a liberal) comment, Maher compliments Florida GOP governor Ron DeSantis for defying the lockdown/ mask mantra while the Left’s howlers accused him of murder. Maher congratulates DeSantis on using real science, not media science, to protect the state’s large elderly population. Yes, he throws in the debunked Trump-swallow-bleach chestnut to keep from getting fire bombed by antifa. But Maher chastises liberal media for perpetuating fear for political reasons.

One example of media contorting the numbers in their narrative is by defying Bayes Theorem. The Rev. Thomas Bayes was an 18th-century clergyman who put a crimp in the certainty theories of his day. Tom Chivers in The Guardian proposes giving a test to a million people using Bayesian logic. “There are 100 people who have the disease: your test correctly identifies 99 of them. And there are 999,900 people who don’t. Your test correctly identifies 989,901 of them. 

“But that means that your test, despite giving the right answer in 99% of cases, has told 9,999 people that they have the disease, when in fact they don’t. So if you get a positive result, in this case, your chance of actually having the disease is 99 in 9,999, or just under 1%.”

As Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight observes,  “Low-probability risks are hard for our brains to compute, period. And after a year+ of having our brains rewired by (often legitimately very scary) COVID risks, it's even harder now.”

Presumably the public will soon compute the unreliability of the media, and— like the hitter accepting the easy bunt—take steps to reclaim their lives. But as long as fear wins, expect the entrenched interests to exploit the observation of Canadian psychiatrist J.T. MacCurdy. “We are all of us not merely liable to being afraid. We are also prone to being afraid of being afraid.”

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx