Those Shifting Pirates

Baseball Prospectus is running a series entitled "Winter is Leaving." It examines each team in the league. The author chooses something obvious about the team--e.g., the Giants article today talks about how Buster Posey and Madison Bumgarner are both good--and expands on it. It's been an entertaining series, and, for those of you unwilling to pay for a BP subscription (despite my recommendation that you do so), it's free.

Anyway, I wrote the article on the Pirates. It's here. The obvious thing I discuss is that the Pirates shift their infielders a lot. The analysis is that the shifts are only the most visible manifestation of the Pirates' run prevention strategy: Get catchers who get a lot of borderline pitches called strikes, pitchers who, aided by the strike calls, generate a lot of ground balls, which are hit to infielders who are positioned optimally to make the play. It's the biggest platform for which I've written. If you click the link, I hope you like it.

And, to follow up on the blatant self-promotion, here is a link to the PowerPoint and here is a link to the audio for the presentation at the Society for American Baseball Research conference I mentioned last week.

Going the Other Way

My latest FanGraphs Community post is here. It's called "Going the Other Way," and it's about players who have gone from pulling the ball to hitting to the opposite field. I got interested in the topic when I wrote about Pirates third baseman Josh Harrison earlier this month. I noticed that, at the time, he'd changed from pulling the ball (i.e., hitting to left field) the ninth most frequently in the National League in 2014 to the the 12th least frequently in 2015. (He's currently pulling the 21st least frequently out of 77 this year.)

You hear a lot that with defensive shifts stacking infielders on one side of the diamond or the other for extreme pull hitters, batters would benefit from hitting more to the opposite field. So I looked at the players who've most dramatically changed from pulling to going the opposite way this year (Harrison's ninth on the list) and, for good measure, those who have gone to pulling more. Does it make a difference? My conclusion: 

[T]he data indicate that changing one’s approach–going from pulling to hitting to the opposite field, or, for that matter, vice-versa–does not appear to have a systemic change in batting outcomes. It works for some players. It doesn’t work for others. 

How to Beat the Shift

Pirates outfielder Gregory Polanco bats and throws left-handed. Like many left-handed batters, he tends to pull ground balls over the the right side of the field, between first and second bases. Here's a spray chart from FanGraphs of his batted balls since he was called up last season. The green dots are grounders. See all the ground balls on the right side of the field?

As a result of these tendencies, teams often employ a shift when Polanco's batting, with the shortstop standing on one side or the other of second base and the second baseman between first and second, leaving the third baseman alone on the left side of the infield. As I wrote back in January, the 2015 Bill James Handbook notes that shifts reduce the shifted batter's batting average by 30 points. 

There are two solutions for shifts. One is to bunt against them. Here's a pretty good example: 

You don't see a lot of bunt doubles.

The other way to beat the shift is to hit to the opposite field, i.e., a left-handed hitter hitting to the left side of the infield or a right-handed hitter hitting to the right side of the infield. Here, for example, is the spray chart for Giants outfielder Nori Aoki:

You won't see teams shifting against Aoki; he hits the ball all over the place. But he's the exception. Most players pull their grounders. For example, here's Pirates second baseman Neil Walker, who's a switch hitter. When he faces a right-handed pitcher, he bats left, and pulls grounders to the right: 

And when he faces a lefty, he bats right, pulling grounders to the left:

The point is, it's not easy for a batter to change his ways and stop pulling. There's a natural tendency for grounders to go the pull field. Going the other way is hard.

This brings us back to Polanco. As you could see from the chart at the top of this post, he tends to pull grounders. He came up in the seventh inning yesterday against the Cubs, one out, game tied at 4, runners on first and second. He ran the count to 3-2. Then Cubs lefty Phil Coke (note that Polanco has a career .180 batting average against lefties) threw a 96 mph fastball up in the zone (pitch number 8 in the chart below):

The Cubs were shifting against Polanco. Here's how the defense looked as the pitch came to the plate. That's first baseman Anthony Rizzo off the bag at first, second baseman Addison Russell between second and first, and shortstop Starlin Castro just to the left of second base. The runner at second, Josh Harrison, is behind the umpire, but you can see that he's farther from second than Castro, the shortstop. The three infielders are bunched to the right side of the infield, expecting Polanco to pull the ball over there. Third baseman Jonathan Herrera isn't even in the picture, as he's close to the bag to prevent a double and also to deny Harrison an easy stolen base.

And here'w what Polanco did: Grounder to just about the exact place the shortstop Castro would be playing if he weren't shifting. Opposite field single to left, Harrison scores, 5-4 lead for the Bucs that held up. THAT'S beating the shift. (Here's the video of the play; unfortunately, it can't be embedded into this post.) 

Twins Trouble

It seems like a generation ago, but the Twins were sort of a model franchise in the recent past. Between 2002 and 2010, the team won the American League Central six times in nine years, with a losing record only once (and that year, 2007, they were 79-83, which isn't that bad). They achieved this success despite being a small-market team with a payroll that ranked in the top half of the league only twice during that nine-year span. 

In the four seasons since then, they've lost 99, 96, 96, and 92 games. The latter record, which landed the Twins in last in the division for the third time in four years, cost manager Ron Gardenhire his job. The Twins enter 2015 with Paul Molitor, St. Paul native and Hall of Famer, at the helm. He's never managed before, but he was the Twins' minor league baserunning and and infield coordinator in 2003 and 2005-2013 (he was Seattle's hitting coach in 2004) and was a coach for the major league team last year.

What's gone wrong? Here's a chart showing the team's rank in OPS+ (that's on base percentage plus slugging, adjusted for home park) and ERA+ (similarly adjusted earned run average) over the past thirteen years. Keep in mind that there were 14 teams in the American League until 2013, when the Astros switched leagues. In the Twins' last pennant season, 2010, represented by the horizontal line below, they were second in OPS+ and sixth in ERA+. They haven't come close to those levels since:

The rankings have bounced around, but what stands out is the collapse of the Twins' pitching beginning in 2011. They've finished second to last, second to last, fourth to last, and last in park-adjusted ERA since their last playoff appearance. The offense hasn't been great, but the problem's been an inability to prevent runs, not to score them.

So what's gone wrong with run prevention? Well, you know how fans and commentators are upset about risking strikeout rates? Say what you will about the team, the Twins pitchers have stayed clear of that controversy. Here's the team's strikeout rate (percentage of batters struck out) for its starters compared to league averages:

Again, the solid line corresponds to the Twins' last pennant. As you can see, after hovering around league averages, the Twins' starters' strikeout rates have plummeted. They improved some last year--welcome the the Twin Cities, Phil Hughes!--but they're still way below average. 

How about the relievers? Same thing:

This, I think, explains a lot of why the Twins have run into trouble. Their pitchers don't miss bats. In the modern game, that's important. For the 30 major league teams last year, the correlation coefficient between strikeout rate and park-adjusted ERA is 0.60, which means that strikeouts are a significant component of run prevention. The more batters you strike out, the fewer runs you allow. The Twins aren't striking out enough batters to have an effective pitching staff. 

Gardenhire's pitching coach, Rick Anderson, wanted Twins hurlers to "pitch to contact and trust your defense, throw strikes and minimize walks to pitch deep into games." Pitching to contact means trying to induce batted balls rather than strikeouts. That's at odds with the trend of rising strikeouts, but I don't think you can assign all the blame on Anderson. As the charts above illustrate, Twins pitchers apparently didn't listen to him much during the Twins' winning years under Gardenhire; the team's strikeout rates weren't out of line with league averages. The Twins' collapse in the standings has corresponded to a collapse in team strikeout rates. That's not a product of just what's going on at the major league level, it's a reflection of an organizational philosophy that has guided both drafting and player development. Twins pitchers don't strike guys out because, well, that's not what they do. The problem is, it simply isn't the way you win ballgames.

In a somewhat notorious case, Gardenhire and Anderson tried to convince pitcher Francisco Liriano to pitch to contact. Liriano was a sensation as a rookie in 2006, going 12-3 with a 2.16 ERA (less than half the league average of 4.56) and striking out 30% of the batters he faced. Unfortunately, that season ended early for him, when Liriano blew out his ulnar collateral ligament, and he missed 2007 after undergoing Tommy John surgery. He pitched only 76 innings in 2008 and was shaky in 2009, going 5-13 with a 5.80 ERA. He had a pretty good year in 2010, though (14-10, 3.62 ERA) and his strikeout rate rose from around 20% in 2008-9 to 25% in 2010. Yet at the beginning of the 2011 season, Gardenhire and Anderson had their talk with Liriano, who responded with a 9-10, 5.09 ERA record as his strikeout rate fell to 19%, the lowest of his career. The Twins gave up on him in 2012, trading him in the middle of a 6-12, 5.34 ERA season to the White Sox in July. He's had a career renaissance since signing with the Pirates before the 2013 season: 23-18, 3.20 ERA, 25% strikeout rate over the past few seasons.

Now, it's not entirely fair to blame Liriano's problems with the Twins, nor his success with Pittsburgh, on the Twins' pitching to contact philosophy. It's true that he had his worst year, from a strikeout perspective, in 2011, after he got Gardenhire and Anderson's pitch-to-contact lecture, but his 24.9% strikeout rate with the Pirates in 2013-14, when he's been good, isn't that much different from his 24.1% strikeout rate with the Twins and White Sox in 2012, when he stunk. As I've written, his turnaround in Pittsburgh is largely due to an overhaul of his pitch selection, junking his fastball in favor of a sinker that generates lots of ground balls. Those grounders get gobbled up by Pittsburgh's infielders, who have aggressively employed shifts in order to position themselves where the ball's likely to be hit, as I wrote in 2013. As the article to which I linked pointed out:

Shifts are only as effective as the number of groundballs hit into them. The second prong of the Pirates' comprehensive run prevention strategy was tied to increasing their pitchers' groundball rates. Defensive change began on the mound. 

So that's how pitching to contact can work: Get the pitchers to generate grounders, assemble a strong defense, and shift the infielders a lot. It's worked for Pittsburgh. How about Minnesota?

If anything, the Twins have gone the other way. Twins pitchers yielded ground balls on 42% of batted balls last year, 12th in the 15-team American League. They were eighth in 2013, 5th in 2012, and eighth in 2011, so they've gotten worse. Not only don't they have pitchers who generate strikeouts, they don't have pitchers who generate grounders. Again, that's an organizational thing, not just a major league level thing.

How about employing defensive shifts? The Twins shifted 85 times in 2013, second fewest in the league. They increased to 478 shifts in 2014, but that moved them up to only 12th in the league. The average American League team shifted 590 times. So they haven't employed shifts, which, as I pointed out, decrease opponents' batting averages on ground balls and soft liners by 30 points, as much as other teams.

As for defense, I looked at the team's defensive efficiency ratio, or DER. DER is a calculation of the percentage of balls in play that get turned into outs. It's useful because it looks that the defensive performance of the entire team. During the Twins' successful run from 2002 to 2010, they ranked eighth or better in the American League every season except 2009. In other words, they were pretty consistently at or, more often, above average. Since then, they've been 13th in 2011, 13th in 2012, 12th in 2013, and 15th in 2014. 

So let's put it together: The Twins have emphasized a pitching philosophy, pitching to contact, that's of questionable merit in a strikeout-driven environment. The three tenets of pitching to contact are ground balls, defensive shifts, and fielding. The Twins don't generate ground balls, they don't shift, and the defense stinks.

This isn't a matter of a manager or a pitching coach. The Twins have been building the wrong kind of team. They've botched drafting, player development, and/or roster construction, resulting in a team that's not positioned for success. General manager Terry Ryan, who held the position from 1994 until after the 2007 season, and again beginning in November 2011, and Bill Smith, who was the team's GM in the interim four years, bear the blame for creating a roster of pitchers who can't miss bats and fielders who can't catch balls. They appear to have been way late to the game of using advanced metrics to position Twins fielders in order to increase outs. It's true that the Twins have a highly-regarded farm system--ESPN's Keith Law ranks them second in baseball--but their two top prospects played only 31 games between them in injury-riddled 2014 seasons. They've been bad for four years because the manager's been given a team that has the wrong type of players for contemporary baseball.

But by all means, blame Gardy. Gotta be his fault, right?

The Thing With Shifts

Sunday was the first day on the job for new baseball commissioner Rob Manfred. He wasted no time in wading into controversy. In an interview with ESPN's Karl Ravech that day, he said,

For example, things like eliminating shifts, I would be open to those sorts of ideas.

He later backtracked a bit, but the idea of eliminating shifts is now on the table.

This isn't new. Sports Illustrated writer Tom Verducci proposed eliminating shifts last summer, and I responded to his idea then. Then, as now, I don't think it's a good idea, but let me unpack the argument a bit more here. 

What kind of shifts are we talking about?

This isn't the usual shifts, like infielders guarding the line to protect against doubles, or outfielders playing shallow when a low-power hitter like the Phillies' Ben Revere is at the plate. These are what some call "extreme shifts," generally defined as three infielders on one side of second base. Take the example at right. That's a game between the Astros and the Mariners in April 2013. The Mariners' Franklin Gutierrez is at the plate. The Astros' second baseman, shortstop, and third baseman are all playing on the left side of second base. 

Why are they doing this? Because Gutierrez has a pronounced tendency to hit ground balls there. Here's a chart showing the location of his batted balls in 2012 and 2013. (Source: FanGraphs.) The green dots are grounders. As you can see, Gutierrez hits the vast majority of his ground balls to the left side. Put another way, if Gutierrez hits a grounder, he's likely to hit it within range of the Astros fielders above. That wouldn't necessarily be the case in a traditional defensive alignment, with the second baseman on the first base side of the bag and the shortstop further toward second.

How prevalent is this?

Well, shifts like this have been around for a long time. The first instance I could find was used in the 1920s against Phillies outfielder Cy Williams. The most famous one was probably the 'Williams Shift" that teams employed against a different Williams, Red Sox slugger Ted. A left-handed batter, he tended to pull balls to the right side of the field, so teams would line up fielders there. It began in a 1946, in a doubleheader in July. In the first game, Williams went 4-for-5 with three homers and eight RBI in a game against the Indians. In the second game, Indians manager Lou Boudreau moved his team into a crazy alignment when Williams came to the plate. (I figure Boudreau effectively said, "Shit, I don't know, let's try this" as a last resort.) The outfielders shaded to the right with the rightfielder playing deep. The shortstop (Boudreau) moved between first and second, the third baseman played to the right of third, and the second baseman was in the short outfield, near the right field line. There were effectively four outfielders (two in right), three infielders to the right of second base, and none to the left of second. Williams got two walks and a double in four trips to the plate, scoring two runs in a 6-4 Red Sox victory, so in the context of Ted Williams, maybe it worked. One of the baseball card companies, Fleer, commemorated it with a card, shown above.

Anyway, the Williams Shift had limited success, given that the Splendid Splinter finished his career with arguably the best hitting statistics of all time. Shifts like this didn't really catch on widely until recent years, as baseball analytics have enabled teams to chart every batted ball, resulting in charts like the one I showed above for Franklin Gutierrez.

The 2015 Bill James Handbook has a section on shifts, full of bad puns (e.g., the title is "Who Gives a Shift?"). I'm not going to reproduce everything here--buy the book, it's really good, if you want details--but one of the interesting figures is that there were 2,357 shifts employed in 2011 but 13,296 in 2014. That's a 464% increase in three years. In terms of shifts per game, that works out to 0.97 shifts per game in 2011 (that's the total for both teams) and 5.47 shifts per game in 2014. In 2014, the Houston Astros shifted the most, 1,341 times, or 8.3 times per game. That's extreme, and there were only six teams (Astros, Rays, Yankees, Orioles, Blue Jays, and Pirates) that shifted more than four times per game.

So to answer how prevalent shifts are: Growing rapidly, but other than a few teams, not deployed all that often.

How much have shifts suppressed offense?

The Bill James Handbook answers that pretty clearly:

If you look at the league as a whole, the average decrease in batting average when players are shifted is 30 points.

That's a lot. When Boston's David Ortiz, who faced a shift in 95% of his plate appearances, hit a ground ball or a soft liner--the types of batted balls the shift is designed to turn into outs--he batted .201 when the shift was on but .250 when it was off. 

The Bill James Handbook estimates the impact of shifts in 2014 was 195 runs. In other words, shifts prevented 195 runs from being scored. Thirty points in batting average, 195 runs--no wonder Manfred's thinking about stamping out shifts, right?

Except that's not really big, as Ben Lindbergh points out in this article and Dave Cameron does in this one. (For comic relief, read this post by Grant Brisbee.) That 30 point suppression of batting averages, as I pointed out, occurs in only 5.5 plays per game, on average. And 195 runs scored...well, there were 19,761 runs scored in 2014. 195 equals a shade under 1%. Teams scored 4.07 runs per game last season; adding back 195 boosts the figure only to 4.11.

And I want to reiterate a point I made in July. Let's look at the league-wide batting average on balls in play and the batting average on grounders. (The difference between overall batting averages and batting averages on balls in play is that the latter excludes strikeouts and home runs, neither of which can be defensed.) Here's the table over the past ten years, from FanGraphs:
           Batting Avg   Batting Avg
   Year   Balls in Play   Grounders
   2005      .295           .233
   2006      .301           .236
   2007      .303           .239
   2008      .300           .237
   2009      .299           .232
   2010      .297           .234
   2011      .295           .231
   2012      .297           .234
   2013      .297           .232
   2014      .299           .239
Do you see a pattern there? I don't. Batting average on balls in play went up in 2014 despite the explosion of shifting. And the batting average on grounders was the second-highest in the 13 seasons for which FanGraphs has data (.2386 compared to .2394 in 2007). What gives? If shifts are hurting batting averages, why aren't these batting averages going down? And if the averages aren't going down, why are runs being suppressed?

Why aren't batting averages and grounders and balls in play lower?

Because batters are really good. Seriously. I mean, we hear all the time about how pitching's dominating the game. The average fastball velocity last season was 91.6 mph, the highest in history. Pitcher struck out 19.4% of batters, the most in history, and walked only 7.1%, the fewest since 1921, which is just crazy. But at the same time, starting pitchers are typically done after six innings. (2011 was the last time starters averaged more than six innings per start.) The reason? Yes, there are pitch counts and eight-man bullpens and all that, but also, there aren't easy outs. Despite all the challenges for hitters, they're still batting about .300 on balls in play and in the .230s on grounders. That hasn't changed, and it's a reflection of the skill of major league batters.

So why is scoring down?

Well, let's look at that batting average on balls in play in two ways. First, let's consider the type of hits that batters get. I'm going look at the number of singles, doubles, and triples batters get when they hit balls in play. Add them together, and you get the total batting average on balls in play. Here's the table: 

Season	1B	2B	3B	Total
2005	0.221	0.067	0.007	0.295
2006	0.225	0.069	0.007	0.301
2007	0.226	0.070	0.007	0.303
2008	0.224	0.069	0.007	0.300
2009	0.224	0.068	0.007	0.299
2010	0.224	0.066	0.007	0.297
2011	0.222	0.066	0.007	0.295
2012	0.223	0.066	0.007	0.297
2013	0.226	0.065	0.006	0.297
2014	0.227	0.065	0.007	0.299

Singles and Doubles per Batted Ball, 2005 = 100

That's not very helpful, is it? But given that triples are pretty rare events, occurring in about 0.7% of plays, let's focus just on singles and doubles. In 2005, when balls were put in play, batters got a single 22.1% of the time and a double 6.7% of the time. Let's use that as our baseline, and set those years equal to 100. Look at the chart at right. Over the past few years, singles are up and doubles are down. Overall batting averages on balls in play, as we've seen, are holding steady. But there are more singles and fewer doubles. That's not because of shifting--shifts suppress singles, not doubles--but it affects scoring overall.

Home Runs and Strikeouts per Plate Appearance, 2005=100

Now, let's look at batting averages on balls in play another way. What's excluded? Home runs and strikeouts. Here's another chart like the one above. But this time, let's look at home runs and strikeouts per plate appearance. This one's more pronounced. Home runs are in decline, while strikeouts have moved unremittingly upward. When batters are hitting balls in play, they're getting more singles but fewer doubles, as the chart above demonstrates. When they're not hitting balls in play, they're striking out more and hitting fewer homers.

So are shifts the problem?

There is no question that offense is down. Teams scored 4.07 runs per game in 2014, the lowest in a non-strike year since 1976. The reasons, as I've shown above, are clear: More strikeouts, fewer homers, fewer doubles. Shifts have played a minor role and are pretty insignificant compared to the other factors. If the new Commissioner wants to address scoring, he should look at ways to promote more contact, and more hard contact, by batters, not worry about where the fielders are standing.

(Thanks to JBM for inspiring me to write this.)

Reality Check: Defensive Shifts

Tom Verducci writes about baseball for Sports Illustrated and talks about on the MLB Network. He's a smart guy and a great writer. He's passionate about the game as well, writing on occasion about ways it could be better. He did so last week, proposing that baseball do something to limit defensive shifts: moving fielders to one side or the other of second base in order to take advantage of hitters' tendencies to hit the ball there. You know, like this:

Verducci cites the situation pictured above in particular, when the player at the plate is lefthanded, he tends to hit balls to the right side of the infield, and, in addition, he's slow. (I can't speak to the speed of the guy at the plate in this picture; I can't make him out.) He cites slow left-handed batters who pull having down years: Chris Davis, Ryan Howard, Jay Bruce, Adam Dunn, Brian McCann, Shin-Soo Choo, David Ortiz, and Adrian Gonzalez, among others. He has a pretty convincing table: batting average on balls in play (i.e., excluding at bats that result in strikeouts or home runs) for left-handed hitters when they hit the ball to the right side of the infield:
   2005   .379
   2006   .386
   2007   .353
   2008   .358
   2009   .350
   2010   .351
   2011   .332
   2012   .313
   2013   .323
   2014   .301

Verducci:

In 2010, Howard, McCann, Ortiz, Bruce, Dunn, Choo, Curtis Granderson and Adam LaRoche all were among the best lefthanded hitters in the game. None of them were All-Stars this year. Fewer hits to the pull field – into the shift – is one reason. Throw in former All-Stars Mark Teixeira and Carlos Beltran, two more slow-footed sluggers (and using only their numbers batting lefthanded), and you can see how the shift is harming lefthanders...

Ignore that some of those guys haven't been good for years. His point, that the shift's affected lefties since the Tampa Bay Rays started becoming shift-happy in 2008, seems to be borne out by the numbers above. His solution: That baseball should look into establishing an "illegal defense rule" that'd limit the number of infielders on either side of second base to two. 

Verducci's proposal met with a fair amount of criticism on the Internet, partly because he's proposing a pretty significant change to the rules of the game. I don't really buy that. The rules of baseball aren't inviolable; we added replay and removed home plate collisions this year. If there's a problem in the game, let's address it.

The problem I have is that I'm not sure the response Verducci's proposing--limiting defensive shifts--will address the problem of a decline in offense, simply because there's not a lot of evidence I can see that shifts are the culprit. I'm going to show you a somewhat busy table, so let me explain the columns. The first one, Year, is self-explanatory. BABIP is the batting average on balls in play--that is, the batting average when the batter puts the ball in play (doesn't strike out, walk, get hit by the pitch, etc.) and doesn't hit a home run. Ground is the batting average on ground balls. L vs. L is the batting average for left-handed hitters--the focus of Verducci's research--against left-handed pitchers. L vs. R is the batting average for left-handed hitters against right-handed pitchers. If defensive shifts are hurting offenses, particularly with lefties at the plate, we should see all of these batting averages decline with time, as shifted fielders turn what used to be hits into outs. Here's the table:
   Year    BABIP  Ground  L vs. L  L vs. R
   2005    .295    .233    .295     .299
   2006    .301    .236    .294     .302
   2007    .303    .239    .301     .312
   2008    .300    .237    .298     .302
   2009    .299    .232    .286     .299
   2010    .297    .234    .299     .298
   2011    .295    .231    .291     .301
   2012    .297    .234    .287     .299
   2013    .297    .232    .293     .300
   2014    .299    .237    .297     .307

Do you see any evidence from those number that defensive shifts--which have grown in popularity especially in the last couple years--have hampered offense? I can't. As of today, the batting average on balls in play at its highest level since 2009. The batting average on grounders is the highest it's been since 2008. Left-handed hitters are hitting better against lefties than any year since 2010 and against righties since 2007. Offense is surely down, but it's not because defensive shifts are resulting in plummeting batting averages. So I don't see a need to legislate against shifts.

As to why offense if down: batters are striking out in 20.3% of plate appearances, the most in history--the rate's risen for nine straight years--the walk rate's declined for five straight years and is now at its lowest level since 1968, batters are hitting balls on the ground,  which produce a lower OPS than balls hit in the air, at the highest rate since stats became available in 2002, and the percentage of fly balls leaving the park has declined for two years, to the lowest level since 2011. That's why. Sounds like a problem of good pitching rather than innovative defense.