Put Ned Yost in baseball’s anti-defensive shift camp.
The topic arose from a recent report affirming that baseball was on pace to have the fewest singles in a season, and Yost had his reason.
“It’s a product of the shift in my mind, more than anything else,” Yost said. “It’s harder to hit singles. You either go the other way or find a crease, which is increasingly more difficult than it’s ever been.
The story by Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports suggests several factors for singles accounting for 63.69 percent of the base hits in baseball this year: swing changes, strikeouts and defensive position chief among them.