Archive for shift

The infield shift is a much-maligned defensive strategy, hounded as one of the worst analytics-based changes to baseball. Multiple times each season there will be some conversation about banning the shift, and each time pros, ex-players/managers, commentators, and analysts will chip in with their two cents. But for now, the shift is here, and it is as popular (with the fielding teams) as it has ever been. Just under 26% of all pitches were thrown with some form of infield shift in place in 2018, 22% of at-bats had a shift for the entirety of it, and 30% had at least one pitch shifted.

As you can see, left-handed hitters are far more likely to be shifted than their right-handed counterparts, with 46% of left-handed ABs seeing a shifted pitch versus 19% for righties. This makes rudimentary sense as the shifted players for a left-hander are closer to first base, so they have a greater chance of impacting the play to first and therefore stopping a potential single.

I have taken players who have 100-plus at-bats in 2018 both against a shifted and non-shifted infield, then I compared the outcomes. There were 132 such players, and their combined number of at-bats was 72,389 (39% of the seasons total). I have split these up into four categories based on the handedness of the batter and the pitcher.

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The shift is one of the most discussed changes in baseball in many years. It is probably the biggest purely defensive change in decades (right?). Commissioner Manfred has publicly stated that he dislikes it. Players are actively working with hitting coaches to beat the shift. People are asking, how can we beat the shift? And some are starting to deny we can. FanGraphs comments predict that the shift will be bad for baseball, because less offense is less fun.

But just how big is the shift? Just how much has it changed the league?

Zero.

Okay, “Zero” is too strong. It might have changed something, but if it has we can’t tell.

Okay, that too is too strong, but, the number of obvious statistical correlates of an effective shift, seen in terms of league wide stats, is zero. Maybe we can tell, but if so, it can only be told in some serious data-mining that goes beyond obvious results, like number of outs, even in splits, since teams started shifting. No evidence exists of a change in the league-wide stats you would expect the shift to change. BABIP is unchanged. Grounder BABIP is unchanged. Left-handed batter BABIP is unchanged. In fact, BABIP is higher today than it was 40 years ago, but BABIP inflated about .02 from the 1970s to the 1990s and hasn’t evidently changed since.

The shift is a defensive strategy whose intent is to depress run expectancy on balls in play. The likely effect of the shift, if the strategy works, would be in increasing outs on balls in play. Here is a table of BABIP since 1995, the last 20 years:

Year    BABIP
1995   0.298
1996   0.301
1997   0.301
1998   0.300
1999   0.302
2000   0.300
2001   0.296
2002  0.293
2003   0.294
2004   0.297
2005   0.295
2006   0.301
2007   0.303
2008   0.300
2009   0.299
2010   0.297
2011   0.295
2012   0.297
2013   0.297
2014   0.299
2015   0.299

The apparent trend is obvious, if something can be obviously non-existent.

We can look deeper: how have lefties, whom the shift allegedly affects more, been hurt by the shift? Well, in 2015 lefty hitters had their highest BABIP (.301) versus lefty pitchers in the last 13 years (as long as FanGraphs data goes for that split.) Against right-handed pitchers, left-handed batters tied their second-worst season (.299) in the last 15 years, for a whopping one hit in 500 less than the average during that time (.301).

You see, the problem is that we need to look at grounders: fly balls and line drives aren’t really being affected, but grounders are, so in the long run, the shift is slightly depressing hits. Except the obvious correlate isn’t there either.  In 2015, grounders had a .236 BABIP, .004 higher than the 13-year average.

2015 isn’t some sort of outlier. In every easy-to-research split you might choose, BABIP fluctuations in the last 13 years are within the range of random variation. The recent years of the shift era show not even a statistically insignificant decrease in BABIP: in many of those splits, BABIP has by a hair increased. (See tables linked below.)

Another source of evidence that the shift works might be found by comparing defense-independent pitching models with non-defense-independent stats. Maybe BABIP leaves something out, but we see that runs are down relative to DIPS predictions. If so, one possible explanation is the shift. FIP, a great DIPS, is equal to 3*BB+13*HR-2*K + C, where C is a constant that makes league-average FIP equal league-average ERA. If C is smaller now, that suggest (but does not prove) that BIP outs have changed. C is bigger now (by just .0053, or .048 runs per inning), suggesting that more runs are scored from balls in play. It’s no proof, but if balls in play were a lot more frequently outs, we wouldn’t expect them, overall, to account for more runs and ERA would be down more than peripherals imply.

We can’t infer from this data that some individual hitters are unaffected by the shift. Jeff Sullivan’s recent piece on adjusting to the shift is what brought me to the data (I was seeking to investigate just how badly lefty hitters have been hurt, and discovered something far more interesting), and he mentioned Jimmy Rollins’ attempts to adjust to the shift. I recall a lot of speculation about Mark Teixeira being hurt by the shift. Maybe those guys are. Maybe they aren’t. Maybe they aren’t, but others yet to be named are. Things which don’t have league-wide effect may interact with particular skillsets in hard-to-identify ways.

It’s possible that the shift has changed things by reducing the value of range up the middle, allowing more offensively-oriented players to man those positions. But that seems more like an effect that we would see in future, not one we have seen, because it should take years of player development for those sorts of changes to have a league-wide effect.

It is possible that the shift increases strikeouts and depresses walks. It would be hard to know this, though. It is also possible that the shift has reduced the value of certain defensive skills (e.g., range) and that the decreased need for range has allowed teams to play more offensively-oriented guys up the middle, effectively cancelling the BABIP effects. It sounds farfetched to suppose that two of eight hitters being more offensively-minded can cancel an effect of a shift that should apply to eight of eight of them, but we haven’t ruled it out.

Overall, league scoring is down. But DIPS suggest this is mostly the result of more strikeouts, with a little home-run and walk noise thrown in. There are some ways in which the shift might be having an effect — please offer further hypotheses below. All the evidence here is correlational and correlation doesn’t imply causation. Even anti-correlation doesn’t imply non-causation (if people who drink more exercise more — both are correlated positively with wealth — drinking might get anti-correlated with bad health because exercise compensates for the health impact of drinking). But when no correlation is found and no obvious counter-effects can be sighted, the lack of a correlation suggests weak influence at best.

References:

League BABIP, 1975 to 2015

LHB v. LHP and LHB v. RHP, all available years

Ground Ball BABIP, all available years

We see it every night. A weak groundball to a defensively incapable player, a broken-bat roller behind the mound into no-man’s-land, a slap hit into the vacated area caused by the shift, a tomahawk chop resulting in a dirt-bounce that goes 20 feet upward. Not good enough to be a true hit, not bad enough to be an error. Infield hits are awkward.

“It’ll look like a line drive in the box score,” the broadcasters chirp happily. And while that’s very true, I would argue that infield hits are ESPECIALLY demoralizing for pitchers. Usually, the pitcher made a quality pitch, got the groundball he was looking for, and had little control over the infield defensive positioning or assignments. But because the official scorer ruled the play too difficult for a fielder to make, any runs driven in by the infield hit or resulting later in the inning will be earned.

Infield hits are the result of bad defensive skill, poor defensive positioning, poor use of the shift, sloppy weather conditions, speedy runners, jittery infielders, and/or good old fashioned bad luck. So which pitchers have been victimized the most by infield hits? Let’s look at the numbers for each league.

American League pitchers have allowed 9,650 hits, including 1,166 infield hits (as of June 29). The infield hits/hits rate in the American League, therefore, is 12.1%.

The Athletics’ defense ranks worst in the American League with a -23.9 UZR, and the team’s two best starters suffer a plethora of infield hits allowed. Take out Gray’s 17 infield hits allowed, and his already pristine 0.99 WHIP falls to 0.84 WHIP. Without the infield hits, Chris Sale of Chicago would also see his WHIP drop to a crazy 0.82 WHIP. (The ChiSox need to figure out how to shift.) Keuchel is the king of groundballs (64.5% GB), so infield hits are only natural to him. Same goes for Madson and his 56.4% GB rate. The Yankees’ middle infield has been miserable this year, and the team doesn’t know how to shift properly. Warren, Rogers, and Betances have been the poor-luck “beneficiaries.”

Nate Karns (45.4% GB) and Brad Boxberger (36.6% GB) are the real enigmas here, as the Rays have the second-best defense in the AL. Bad luck? Infielders hate them? Poor use of the shift by Tampa Bay coaches? According to Inside Edge, Rays defenders make only 4% of very difficult plays, labelled “remote.” Since these plays are too difficult to be ruled an error if the defender miffs, these balls in-play are often ruled infield hits (if, of course, they occur on the infield). For the curious, the Yankees are dead last (1.2%), and the Blue Jays are first (19%).

Zach Britton’s rate really jumps out, but it is most likely a result of very few hits allowed overall and, as with all the relievers, a small sample size. Britton has only allowed 28 hits on the season, and only 17 have left the infield. Dominant.

National League pitchers have allowed 9,892 hits, including 1,174 infield hits (as of June 29). The infield hits/hits rate in the National League, therefore, is 11.8%.

Noah Syndergaard (16.6% infield hits/hits) just missed this list, so that’s three Mets starters who have allowed way more infield hits than the average NL starter. The Mets have already taken Wilmer Flores off shortstop, but Eric Campbell (-1.1 UZR) and Daniel Murphy (-2 UZR) aren’t helping either. Brett Anderson (68.7% GB rate) is the most predictable pitcher on this chart, but Alex Wood and Shelby Miller are not, especially since 2B Jace Peterson and SS Andrelton Simmons flash the leather on a nightly basis. (Do the Braves  suffer from the Dee Gordon effect or just from poor use of the shift?)

The Cardinals infield has been below average defensively (Matt Carpenter -1.6 UZR; Mark Reynolds -1.6 UZR; Jhonny Peralta -1.1 UZR), which partially explains Lynn and Rosenthal. Starlin Castro (-3.4 UZR) and Arismendy Alcantara (-2.0 UZR) have not helped out Hendricks or Strop defensively either. Benoit is on the wrong team defensively to have a career-high ground ball rate (43.6%).

Finally, who has been stingy with infield hits? For the American League:

And for the National League:

Just something else Max Scherzer has been amazing at in 2015.