[Pelican]

Well, Ryan Howard was a perfect example of this. He was strong enough (and quick enough, in his younger days) to hit an outside pitch out to left-center field. If you can locate a scatter chart, I’m confident it would show that he did this all the time. Sure, he could pull the ball to RF as far as anyone, ever; but pitchers tended to keep the ball away, and he learned to get the barrel on those pitches. And yes, there were long fly outs to LF and CF, and plenty of pop-ups, too. And very few ground balls or line drives to the left side of the diamond. So teams still played the infield shift on him, with some success. He went from a .300 hitter to a .200 hitter pretty fast. Still walked a lot, with tremendous power when healthy.