Few MLB teams use defensive shifts as often as Houston, which has benefited from its implementation.
Elaine Thompson/AP
The count was 2-and-0 to Mike Trout on April 4 in Houston, and when he looked up, he couldn't believe what he saw: The Astros had shifted their infield to put three infielders on the pull side. "Me? The way I hit?" Trout said. "I was surprised."
Trout's approach to hitting is based on letting the ball travel and hitting the ball up the middle or over the second baseman's head. What did the Astros know about the centerfielder of the Los Angeles Angels to cause such a shift that was so odd it shocked Trout himself?
The answer is, not much. Trout is only 22 years old. Until then, he had put the ball in play on 2-and-0 counts only 34 times in his young career. In those counts, he did not profile as a pull hitter: He hit the ball up the middle 17 times, to the pull field 13 times and to the opposite field four times.
The Astros again overshifted their infielders against Trout in another at-bat when the count went to 3-and-1. The career sample size for that count was a little bigger -- 51 balls in play -- but that spray chart showed even less of an indication of a pull-happy hitter: 30 pitches hit up the middle on 3-and-1 counts, 11 pitches pulled and 10 pitches hit the other way. Still, the Astros, armed with more sophisticated data about Trout, moved their infielders.
"It's working," said Houston general manager Jeff Luhnow, whose team deploys more shifts than any club in baseball. "We feel confident the evidence is very convincing when we analyze how we use our innovative defensive alignments. We believe our data shows we're on the right path."
The Houston pitcher facing Trout was Jerome Williams. Trout flied out to centerfield in both of the at-bats with Houston deploying the count-specific shift. But the results are not so important. What is important is what those seemingly odd shifts represent: Defensive positioning has become one of the biggest changes to how baseball is played since the designated hitter was adopted in 1973. What may seem strange quickly is becoming common.
Baseball likes to hold on to this quaint if incorrect notion that the sport is so timeless that someone from a century ago could sit down to watch a game today and enjoy fairly the same game he saw when night baseball or games west of St. Louis never existed. The adoption -- no, the flat-out overnight embracing -- of defensive shifts blows up such a romantic idea. Anybody from just 10 years ago has to look at the way baseball is played today and find defensive positioning to be wholly different. The takeaway now is this: My goodness, we were playing defenders in the wrong place for 150 years!
It's easy for even a casual fan to notice this revolution, but Baseball Info Solutions has provided the raw data for confirmation. In just three seasons, from 2011 to 2013, teams more than tripled the number of times they used a shift on balls put into play (from 2,358 shifts to 8,134). And the numbers from this April indicate another large leap is happening this season. Many clubs are hiring the equivalent of a "defensive coordinator" to plan and arrange the many versions of the shifts.
The defensive overshift has become standard operating procedure. Why? It's the data, of course. The more data that is collected and analyzed, the more teams are shifting. And the more influence data collectors have in front offices, the more the manager and coaches are simply middle managers making use of the information.
But it's more than just data collecting that is growing. It's also the faith in the data. Trout may have pulled only 13 3-and-1 pitches in his entire major league career, but the Astros trusted that Trout would pull the pitch -- trust that also involved confidence that Williams can execute an inside pitch with precision and that Trout is more likely to pull the ball when he hits it on the ground.
Is such faith in numbers justified? Are defensive shifts really (if you want to play along with a hypothetical parlor game) "saving runs?" That's the key question, of course. The answer is less obvious than you think. Think of defensive shifting as an immature industry: It still is evolving, as is the offensive approach against it.
The shift does seem to work especially well against dead-pull hitters, but not as well overall as you might think. You would think that all this data and all this shifting would make life increasingly difficult for hitters -- that we would be seeing a marked improvement in the rate of how defenses turn batted balls into outs, and a sharp downturn in batting average on balls on play. But we're not.
Teams turn 68.9 percent of batted balls into outs this year. That's down not just from last year (69.2%), but also down from 1984 (69.9%), 1974 (70.2%) and 1964 (70.5%). Likewise, batting average on balls in play this year (.296) is higher than what it was 30 years ago (.286), 40 years ago (.282) and 50 years ago (.279).
It sounds counterintuitive. But shifts are not a fad; teams are convinced they work, and overall, they do. But how can it be that the Yankees, who along with the Astros shift more than any other team, were a more efficient defensive team back in 1990, with a 95-loss outfit under Bucky Dent and Stump Merrill, than they were last year or have been this year?
*****
David Ortiz is a pull hitter. You knew that even without the data. Just watch the Red Sox play a few games and you can see that Ortiz prefers to pull pitches, though he also is apt to hit the ball the other way against some lefthanders and in many RBI situations. But years ago, no one was certain exactly how often and when he pulled the ball. Life was good for Ortiz back when opponents relied more on advance scouting reports and institutional memory than sophisticated data to position their defense.
Then the Tampa Bay Rays hired Joe Maddon.
In 2006, in what was his first trip to Fenway Park in his first month on the job, Maddon broke out a defensive alignment he had kicked around in his head in his years as a coach with the Angels. When Ortiz came up, Maddon stationed six players in the outfield -- four of them, including the third baseman, spread among normal outfield depth, and the shortstop and second baseman positioned on the grass in short rightfield, behind the infield cutout. Maddon would admit privately there was some gimmickry to the alignment; Ortiz was wearing out the American League, and the manager figured the trickery might play with his head. But it also was based on Ortiz's spray charts, which showed that he rarely hit a groundball to the left side.
Life at the plate would never be the same for Ortiz. Maddon's defensive strategies first drew chuckles, but when Tampa Bay won the 2008 pennant, Maddon and the Rays suddenly looked more like geniuses than tricksters. From 2007 to 2008, the Rays improved by 31 wins, and the third year of their defensive positioning system -- they were using data-based shifts routinely -- deserved much of the credit.
How much did Tampa Bay improve on defense? The answer could be found in Defensive Efficiency, which measures the percentage of balls in play that a team turns into outs. From 2007 to 2008, the Rays improved from last in the league in Defensive Efficiency (.652) to first (.708), an extraordinary leap.
The rest of baseball noticed. The shift, especially against obvious pull hitters such as Ortiz, became more common and more extreme. Look at how deeply the emergence of shifts against Ortiz changed his career:
| David Ortiz Batting Average When Pulling the Ball | ||||||||||||
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"The first time I really noticed it was with Joe Maddon," said Ortiz, who entered this week with 2,045 career hits. "I'd probably have like 2,600 or 2,700 hits without the shift. It's just something that I learned not to worry about. It's just common now. Some teams, they play me so deep with the second baseman, there was a game against Baltimore where I hit a flyball and the second baseman caught it two steps from the warning track."
Ortiz is far from alone. Shifts are deployed much more often against lefthanded hitters than righthanded hitters, especially the prototypical sluggers like Ortiz. And in those cases, the shifts appear to be working very well.
Check out this chart, which shows the year-by-year batting average for all MLB lefthanded hitters when they hit the ball to the opposite field and when they pull it:
| Batting Average by MLB Lefthanded Hitters | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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While the batting average to the opposite field for lefties has gone down slightly (overall batting averages have been trending down), it absolutely has cratered when lefties pull the ball. Shifts appear to be working very well against lefthanded pull hitters.
"That makes sense," Luhnow said. "That's the group with the highest concentration of shifts used against them."
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