There Is No Easy Counter-Shift
Usage of the defensive shift has exploded in recent years, most especially against left-handed bats. More and more teams are shifting more and more often, and there’s a reason this trend shows no signs of slowing down: hitters have been incapable of killing it dead. We celebrate Mike Moustakas for his victory over opposing alignments. Moustakas is the exception.
I’ve been thinking about the shift because of Jimmy Rollins. Or maybe it’s because of Ken Rosenthal, I don’t know, but Rosenthal had a Rollins section in his latest notes article. I’ll excerpt:
Rollins, a switch-hitter, said he needed to adjust to the shifts that he faced batting left-handed. McGwire and Valentin advised him to let the ball travel deeper into the zone, but Rollins said it was difficult to make that correction while facing 90-mph fastballs in the middle of the season.
[…]
“We worked on taking advantage of the overshift,” Rollins said. “You don’t have to crush the ball. You can dribble the ball sometimes and put them in a position where they have to go far for it. They’ll straighten up then. They’ll get tired of that game.”
Think quickly, and it all makes sense. As a lefty, Rollins pulls a ton of his grounders, and teams have increasingly responded by shifting the infield. Rollins doesn’t like that — Rollins doesn’t like losing hits — so he’s set about trying to beat the shift by slapping the ball the other direction. Do that often enough, and successfully enough, and in theory the shift goes away. Then you can try to drive the ball, and get some of the hits the shift had been stealing.
The biggest problem is right there in the excerpt. A hitter can have whatever intentions he likes. But in the flow of a major-league game, it’s not nearly so simple to customize your approach and swing. For the most part, a hitter’s swing is his swing. It can be tweaked, but it is what it is, having been crafted over the course of several seasons. Even the best hitters don’t have both a good pull swing and a good push swing. Going back and forth is difficult, if not impossible, and this is one of the reasons teams love shifting in the first place: If the hitter tries to change his approach, they already count it as a win. When you try to beat the shift by swinging, you’re not swinging how you always have, and you’re cutting down on your own power.
It’s suggested that Rollins could let the ball travel, and then he’ll hit more to left. And then defenses would have to play him more straight-up, so Rollins could go back to pulling. And then on and on. It’s just far simpler in theory than in practice. It’s too much to ask most hitters to have multiple effective swings. Many hitters have enough trouble with one.
The better strategy should be obvious. Rollins wants to beat the shift, but it’s challenging to do so while swinging away. So, Rollins should bunt. Rollins has a history of bunting, and he can still run a little bit. If he were to bunt more, he wouldn’t have to mess around with multiple swings. He could keep the same swing, the familiar swing, and from time to time, he could go up, observe the defense, and put one down. With the overshift alignment, a good bunt is an automatic single. The issue here is that bunting is underratedly hard, even for the experienced bunters. Rollins last year had one bunt single as a lefty. He had zero in 2014, and zero in 2013. Bunting well isn’t as easy as sticking the bat out in front of you, and even if it were, then what? If the defense were to adjust by moving the third baseman closer to the bag, that still doesn’t exactly open up a lot of space for swing-away hits.
In this article from C. Trent Rosecrans, Jay Bruce and Joey Votto talk some about improving their bunts. Bruce acknowledges how hard it is to execute, referring to bunting as an art form. Votto says a bunter has to be perceived as a bunting threat, and he thinks he’s been inconsistent. Votto adds that he doesn’t want to embarrass himself, and that trying to bunt if you’re not a good bunter is wasteful. There’s valuable substance here, I think: Votto’s bat control is as good as you’ll find. He has three bunt hits in his life. If it were an easy thing to do, Votto would do it with far more confidence.
Defenses shift the pull hitters. They knowingly open up plenty of real estate to the opposite field. They proceed because they know it’s a tough alignment to beat. It’s incredibly difficult as a pull hitter to learn how to not be a pull hitter, and while it’s less difficult to learn how to drop down a bunt, it’s far harder than it’s given credit for. It’s not like bunting is some revolutionary idea — it occurs to everyone just the same when they see all that empty space. Bunts against the shift haven’t exactly taken off, and it’s not an accident. Pitches are flying 95 miles per hour, unless they’re flying 80 miles per hour, and all of them are moving, and you never know where the next one’s going to go. A hitter can desire to beat the shift, but we all desire lots of things.
To many, it’s a question of how to beat the shift. To me, it’s a question of why shifting took so long to spread. In retrospect, it seems like it should’ve been a thing almost from the get-go, and now that it’s here, it’s impossible to picture baseball without it. Because frequent shifting is still somewhat new, there’s the idea that it can be overcome, that hitters can fight to get back the hits that they’ve lost. It’s the whole action/reaction thing, based upon the notion that the game is cyclical. To me, it seems people are just psychologically anchored to how the game was. I think there’s a misconception that the shift can be defeated. It’s always going to be a problem. It’s so common we probably shouldn’t even think of it as shifting anymore. More optimal defensive alignment will always be better for defenders than hitters, and hitters just aren’t good enough to pick where they want to hit the baseball. Not now, not consistently, not productively.
Long-term, I’m sure things will find some sort of balance. Teams will be incentivized to find spray hitters, guys who put the ball all over the place unpredictably, and it stands to reason that’ll eventually be reflected in the stats. Teams will want to draft those players, and teams will want to develop those players. The majors will probably end up more selective for the all-fields type. That’s not something that happens overnight, and for players already high up in the professional ranks, it’s usually too late to make a massive adjustment. There are years upon years of repetition in place. It’s a considerable undertaking to re-work a swing, and as easy as it can look to drop down a bunt, they’ll all assure you it’s almost impossible. It’s not as impossible as actually hitting, but, few things are.
From time to time, this year and next year and in so many years ahead, a ball will be put in play in an area a shift leaves vacant. In those specific instances, the shift will have been defeated. The frequency of shifting will also continue to rise, and already, we practically take the shift for granted. It’s just not a thing the hitters can kill. There is no proven counter-attack against defensive optimization.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
I’m thinking that the developmental point here is younger players who aren’t projected to be major power threats. The 40-HR hitters of tomorrow aren’t going to mess with their power stroke, but if you’re only going to be a 15 HR guy at best, there’s probably a good deal to be gained by learning to lay down a good bunt now and again.
One of the primary points of this article is that it’s exceedingly difficult to bunt well. My guess is that for a vast majority of players you simply can’t teach this skill effectively. In the future, the 15-HR power pull hitter is likely just a lousy hitter.
Still a bit easier than actually hitting though, I’d have thought?
Agreed.
What I am suggesting is that there is a category of hitter who might benefit from working more on bunting during an early developmental period, rather than waiting until they’re in the majors and getting shifted to death.
I tried to teach shifting to my beer league softball team. 95% of the players in the league are right handed and none of us were good enough to hit to the opposite field on purpose. I had everyone on board, 2nd baseman played behind the bag, right fielder was in center, center fielder in left center. Literally the first batter hit a squibbler to the 2nd base side of the infield, never even touched the grass. We never shifted again.
You playing fast pitch? My shitty softball team was very slow pitch, and every batter who could make contact (which was not everybody) could time pitches to hit any direction. Several people had to unlearn their instinct to hit it straight back up the middle. (Don’t worry about the pitchers, they just caught our soft line drives.). So shifting would be hopeless.
</nobodycaresaboutyoursoftballteam>
So one bad experience shifted (pun intended) your thought process entirely? So you would never invest in the stock market if you lost money on the first day you invested?
Very good point: the new development isn’t really just shifting (teams have shifted against select hitters for ages) but rather the optimization of defensive alignments for most, if not all, hitters. Just because defenses don’t overshift doesn’t mean they aren’t positioned to disadvantage the hitter. Pull hitters get overshifted, bunters face drawn-in fielders, fast runners face fielders breaking according to the pitch, outfielders will play deep for flyball hitters, shallow for ground ballers…
Everybody’s natural tendencies are targeted; it’s a full toolkit…
I want to see Billy Hamilton go first to third on a stolen base while someone has the shift on Votto.
I think something will have to change, as less hits is sort of a bad thing. I mean, defensive battles can be interesting too, but I’m not sure those sorts of games will do well in ratings or ticket sales.
As Jeff pointed out, the most misguided thing hitters can do is to in any way alter their swing to “beat the shift.” The thing that will in fact change is that lefty hitters will spend more time learning how to drop a decent bunt toward the 3rd-base line. I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that.
At the major and especially the minor league level, teams will start emphasizing (if they haven’t already done so) at least a bit more heavily the bunting drills normally reserved primarily for pitchers and banjo hitters.
Within 4-6 years the shift will be mostly if not entirely obsolete — just as it was for decades, when a much larger percentage of major leaguers had presentable bunting skills.
Well, that’s my lukewarm take anyway.
1. Bunting is hard.
2. Teams will draw the third baseman in.
This is exactly the kind of wishful, return-to-normal thinking Jeff is disputing.
Hitting is hard.
Bunting is easier than hitting.
Forcing the 3B guy to move is a way of defeating the shift.
But my wider point was – games with lots and lots of competent defence and not much scoring will not exactly light the Nielsen ratings on fire. No-one pays money to see defence, either.
I agree with the Nielson point. Shifts reduce scoring, and that’s not a good thing for fan interest in baseball.
I take Jeff’s point to roughly be, this isn’t an easy thing to fix, or something that will naturally fix itself, and it’s a misconception to think otherwise.
Teams will draft more spray hitters, and that skill set will become more valuable. So there’s a long-term change that will reduce the number of hitters who can be shifted against, shrinking its overall impact.
But I read some of the comments as suggesting, well, teams can also *develop* players differently in a game theory sort of sense — just teach them to bunt! And I side with Jeff on this one: while bunting is certainly easier than hitting, it’s actually pretty damn hard to be effective bunting for hits, even against the shift. “Easier than hitting” does not mean “easy” by any stretch. There’s a good reason you don’t see many major league hitters — the best of the best — bunting to beat the shift. There’s a good reason you see pitchers — who are taught bunting as a primary skill in the batters box — fail to execute on bunts so often. And if your winning alternative is a single X% of the time, you have to win quite a bit to actually modify defensive behavior.
Jeff asks “Why shifting took so long to spread.” Why do you think?
There’s an exceptional subconscious arrogance built into Jeff’s question, which really could be re-worded thusly: “Why are front offices/managers so much smarter about shifting now than they were 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 25 years ago, and 40 years ago, during which there were basically no shifts to speak of?”
The answer of course is that current managers are not any smarter than Earl Weaver or Bobby Cox or Whitey Herzog, et. al.. But among the power bat types who now get shifted, for decades their skillsets used to include at least the modest ability to lay a successful bunt down the 3rd base line 40-50% of the time.
So unless you were Ted Williams and you were hitting .350/.450/.650, the smart play was to beat the shift by bunting.
Starting in the 1990’s, thanks no doubt in part to the illegal PED era, the trend toward take ‘n rake batters became more and more extreme, the bunt was largely eschewed as a taught skill for guys with power, and a lot of hitters became mostly indifferent to strikeouts. It was a real culture change.
The shift is a correction of sorts, that’s all — a means of exploiting an unbalanced skillset among modern sluggers. Now the hitters will correct back. It’s inevitable.
Chess is boring. This has not caused people to play in a way that will reduce their chance of winning in order to bring in ratings. Supposing this makes baseball boring and that it is the rational strategy, given the rules, the only solution to boredom is to change the rules.
Do you think simply moving a step away from the plate could benefit hitters? It would make it more difficult for pitchers to get the ball in enough to jam a power hitter and potentially give hitters a better shot at going the other way with a ball on the outter half of the plate. Then again, I’ve seen lots of outside pitches rolled over into grounders to the second basemen from left handed hitters so perhaps stepping away would just cause hitters to hit into the shift even more.
Just means you wouldn’t be able to reach pitches on the outer half
A lineup full of right-handed hitters, who spray the ball reasonably well, would at least alleviate the use of strong shifts. Of course, the trade-off in lineup balance may outweigh the benefit. Depends on the hitters.
I think a lot of people here have it right. It’s something that has to be taught at the minor league level. the same way they now teach infielders how to execute the shift they have to be taught how to beat it at the plate.
Yep I agree. It’s generally good for a players’ approach anyway it seems. Curious to see what effect the shift will have on the Tigers this year, as they fit the description of a team that is difficult to do anything radical against by shifting.