In terms of "the shift" (which is taken to mean putting all of your infield players on the right side of the infield against left-handed batters, but indeed I've seen a number of shifts lately that are exactly the reverse, putting all but the 1B guy on the left side, against righty pull hitters), I'm really of two minds.
First off, there are precedents in other sports of enforcing particular boundaries for players' physical positioning. Football requires very strict positioning rules be observed; hockey and soccer don't allow goalies outside of a given area or other players inside a given area to "help out" the goalies... for instance, how much fun would a soccer game be, if one team just lined up half of their players in front of their own goal and challenged the other team to get it past all of them? Or if you could line up anyone on a football team anywhere on the field you wanted, line of scrimmage be damned? You start to lose the elements that make the game predictable and repeatable, elements you need to plan -- and recognize as a fan -- *any* kind of strategy.
Do the MLB rules give any indication that "the game" expects people to play in specific physical locations? Well, yes, they do. A lot. Consider:
- A batter must remain within the chalked-in batter's box at all times during the actual pitching of the ball. A batter can't start out from outside the box, or the results of the pitch can be tossed out by the umpire. I believe, in some cases, the batter can be called out.
- An on-deck batter must remain in the on-deck circle. We famously saw someone thrown out of a game last year for refusing to follow this positioning rule, what's more making fun of it by literally picking up and moving the batter's box mat over to where he wanted to stand.
- A runner must stay within the designated basepaths while approaching a base. This positioning rule is not consistently enforced, but has become a deciding factor in a number of ballgames. In fact, several runners have been called out approaching first base because they swerved outside of the marked basepath and got in the way of a throw to the guy covering first.
Even though the base itself is not located within the basepath and a runner is required to swerve out of the basepath of get to the base. So, yeah -- positioning on the basepaths is important.
- A pitcher's foot must remain in contact with the rubber until he begins his delivery to home plate. Any tiny movement of the foot off the rubber, followed by the completion of the delivery, is ruled a balk. Otherwise, a pitcher could start with a run-up to the mound starting around second base, and as long as his foot struck the rubber at some point during the run-up, he could delivery the ball up to "three courtesy steps" past the rubber, sort of like the travelling foul commonly uncalled in basketball. Some guys could achieve 140-MPH fastballs, delivered from 40 feet away from the plate, using this approach. But do we see it? Nope -- 'cause it violates baseball's pitcher positioning/movement rules. And, of course, because offense would dry up to nearly nothing if such an approach was allowed...
- The league office has determined that people playing on specific parts of the field can only sport gloves of specific types. This is the best indication that the rules of baseball do not anticipate players shifting between defensive positions during a game, BTW -- if any defender on the field can be allowed to occupy and physical location on the field during a play, you wouldn't have this ridiculous farce of guys having to swap out gloves for a sequence of a few pitches.
So, yeah -- baseball has a lot of rules as to the allowable positioning of players during pretty much any given play. And it has rules that express an implicit understanding of where defensive players are supposed to play. But it doesn't have specific rules stating that players may not occupy different positions, based on the game situation.
How would you make such a rule? State that the SS and 3B guys must remain on the left side of the infield, 1B and 2B on the right, and if either set is on the wrong side of second base when the pitch is thrown, it's either a ball, or a balk? Fine, you could do that, and it would remove "the shift" from the game. But it would also remove your standard bunt-crash defensive setups.
Do we really want to stop teams from crashing in on bunts? No? Then we need a set of rules that are different for bunt-crash defenses as opposed to regular defenses. Yeah, it can be done, but now you're getting to need to add extra line judges to the umpire teams, just to keep an eye on where everyone's feet are located when the pitcher releases the ball.
Would such rules make a lot of difference to how the game is playing out these days? Not much -- it would increase hitting averages and run production, but it would also increase the length of games. (Think about that a moment -- the league wants short, high-scoring games, and these are two sets which do not intersect, LOL...) While the league loves offense, I dunno if you'll see rule changes that would, be definition, make the offenses bat longer and, thus, increase game length.
So, while "the shift" does primarily seem to discriminate against left-handed hitters, outlawing it doesn't change the team game, really. It only changes the individual players' games and stats. As fans, we're more interested in our teams' production, but of course Boras primarily sees baseball as individual performers, his view on it is "who gives a flying fuck which team is the current employer of said individual performers?" It's actually in Boras' great favor to view baseball as one huge pool of players, all playing against each other for individual stat rankings, no bothersome things like teams involved So, of course he wants to see the shift outlawed. It reduces the individual stats of his lefty clients, thus reducing their free agent value, thus reducing the amount his percentage adds up to.
This is really all about Scott Boras being a greedy motherfucking son of a bitch who views the game in a way the game should *never* be viewed, really. Nothing else...