Examining Responses to the Shift

Last week, people talked a lot about shifts. People talked about shifts because baseball’s new commissioner talked about shifts, and baseball’s new commissioner talked about shifts because shifts are up and runs are down. Now, it’s been mostly demonstrated that shifts are far from the main reason why run scoring is on the decline, but we all can at least agree that shift usage has skyrocketed. Last year there were almost six times as many shifts employed as there were in 2011. That’s a huge increase in not very much time. Seeing arrangements like this is becoming more common, and these days it’s a surprise when a pull-hitting slugger doesn’t face an adjusted infield.

With shifts on the rise as a defensive strategy, we’ve tried to figure out ways to counter the strategy with a different one at the plate. Ben Lindbergh wrote an excellent recurring column at Baseball Prospectus, detailing bunts against the shift. That’s the obvious bit — it seems almost too easy to get a free single when the third baseman is hugging second. Somewhat famously, bunts against the shift remain unusual. But there’s also the matter of hitting the other way. If a batter starts to spray the ball more, it could effectively undo the shift, and some players have talked about emphasizing an all-fields approach. So, out of curiosity, have we seen any progress? Have hitters demonstrated a better ability to go the other way?

To come up with a pool of players, I grabbed all the hitters who, according to this post, hit at least 25 balls in play with a shift in 2013. These are players who might’ve had the biggest reasons to work on a different approach going into the next season. So the player pool spans from David Ortiz to David Murphy. I eliminated the few players who didn’t play, or who barely played, in 2014. I was left with a sample of 79 guys.

All that was left was linking statistics for both 2013 and 2014 and then calculating the differences. We might as well look at the big picture first.

Overall, there wasn’t much change. There were five more bunts — in about 6,000 fewer plate appearances — but that difference is miniscule: going from one per 412 plate appearances to one per 381. That might as well be noise. Meanwhile, maybe more importantly, there’s this observation:

• 2013: 60% of ground balls pulled
• 2014: 62% of ground balls pulled

The pool actually pulled more ground balls than it did in 2013 — though by an admittedly small amount. I didn’t have an easy way of looking at both grounders and short liners, so grounders alone function as a proxy. This is what the shift is trying to defend, and on balance, the hitters didn’t hit away from the shift more.

But within any data set, there’s variation. Some hitters pulled more ground balls. Some hitters pulled fewer ground balls. This doesn’t necessarily have to be by design; there’s definitely a randomness factor. Yet we can acknowledge that and still try to move forward. We find Brandon Moss at one end: his pulled-grounder rate dropped 14 percentage points, from 81% to 67%. Prince Fielder is nearby, as are Pedro Alvarez and Justin Morneau. At the other end, Lyle Overbay’s rate increased 13 percentage points. Joey Votto by 15 percentage points. Curtis Granderson by 18 percentage points. And Freddie Freeman, a remarkable 24 percentage points. Ground-ball spray charts, from Baseball Savant:

Two years ago, Freeman pulled just under 45% of his ground balls. A note from an ESPN blog post:

Freeman is not an ideal candidate for a defensive shift.

Then last year, he pulled more than 68% of his ground balls. Perhaps not coincidentally, Freeman’s batting average on grounders dropped from .235 to .194. More often, he was putting the ball right where the defense was looking for it.

We can split the pool into two groups: There were 49 of the hitters who either didn’t change their pulled-grounder rates, or who saw an increase. The remaining 30 all decreased their pulled-grounder rates. The former will be Group 1; the latter will be Group 2.

Some splits:

Group 1

• 2013: .226 average on grounders
• 2014: .207 average on grounders

Group 2

• 2013: .213 average on grounders
• 2014: .213 average on grounders

That’s easy enough. The first group, which pulled more grounders overall, saw its productivity on grounders decrease. The second group saw no decrease at all, although it did start from a worse position. But then there’s this part:

Group 1

• 2013: 112 wRC+
• 2014: 102 wRC+

Group 2

• 2013: 116 wRC+
• 2014: 109 wRC+

Technically, Group 1 got worse by 9%, while Group 2 got worse by 6%. But the differences here are too small to make anything of, given the samples’ limited sizes. Both groups got a little worse; both groups remained pretty good at hitting. This would be more interesting to examine with bigger samples, but for the time being there’s nothing I can do about that.

This gets into one of the complicating bits: Some hitters don’t want to change their approaches because they feel iy would just make them worse overall, by getting them to focus on something other than their strengths. If you take a powerful lefty and ask him to go the other way more ofter, maybe you’ll get an extra single here and there. But how many extra-base hits might you lose? With certain elite players, it seems you can get both. Jose Bautista, for example, got better about shooting the ball to right field, and he also lifted his wRC+ from 133 to 159. It would be too much to ask, though, for the average hitter to do what Bautista can do. In a way, the shift hurts offense simply by existing. It’s bad to hit into it, but if you try not to hit into it, you might end up sacrificing power. You’d like to see more bunts — because it’s possible for a hitter to bunt every now and then without changing the mechanics of his swing — but some of this is stubbornness and some of this is discomfort with unfamiliarity.

Still, bunting does seem like the way to go. Assuming shifts aren’t actually outlawed, they can be beaten by bunts or by hits the other way. But it’s extremely difficult to get most guys to hit the other way if they’re used to pulling the ball. The all-fields approach is probably something that will just have to be developed from lower levels. It might be too tough to change players who’ve already established themselves in the bigs. The bunting? There, there’s no excuse. There needs to be a lot more bunting. But I think we’ve figured this for years. They’ll get the message someday.