Baseball’s ‘Shift': Does It Work? – Wall Street Journal

Nobody enjoys going up against the baseball skeptics. These people are notoriously averse to new ideas and philosophies. If it were up to them, everyone would be wearing stirrups.

But after several years of experimentation around the major leagues, even the purest of purists seem to have warmed up to one thoroughly modern tactic: the defensive shift. These days, more and more teams are positioning fielders in unusual locations based on the tendencies of the other team’s hitters. The tactic has even been hailed as a low-cost weapon that helps low-spending teams like the Tampa Bay Rays and Pittsburgh Pirates better compete with the richer clubs.

So here are two obvious questions: Does the shift actually prevent more hits than it allows? And are some teams better at it than others?

The company I work for, Inside Edge, provides data to major-league teams. Many of these teams want to know about shifts, so we’ve spent a lot of time studying them. Our analysts have watched thousands of plays over several seasons in which shifts were deployed to chart the results: Did the shift negate a hit, lead to a hit that wouldn’t have occurred with the key fielder in a traditional fielding position, or did it make no difference at all?

Some of what we’ve learned isn’t surprising. For one thing, baseball can breathe a sigh of relief: Overall, the shift works. Shifts have saved a net of 390 hits this season through Monday. If we were to add those 390 hits back into the grand total, the overall MLB batting average would rise to .254 from .252—a significant increase considering we’re talking about 146,785 at-bats.

But the study has yielded a few surprises. First, shifts sometimes get too much credit. In some cases, a ball that is put in play is handled by a “shifted” fielder—say, a shortstop playing to the right side of second base—which most observers will chalk up as a “win” for the shift. But if the team hadn’t had a shift on, the second baseman would have been in the same spot and made the same play—so the shift doesn’t deserve the credit it is given.

Far more surprising is that shifts don’t work for every team. In fact, they have actually worked against some. Take a look at the Pittsburgh Pirates. They ranked No. 5 in MLB in total shifts attempted in our sample with 826. But the net result of all those shifts has been -2 hits, meaning the Pirates allowed more hits because of the shift than they would have if they’d been positioned normally.

It is tempting to conclude that the Pirates are just doing it wrong, or that hitters are finding ways to “beat” their shifts by hitting or bunting the ball where the defenders aren’t. But neither scenario appears to be true. After watching hundreds of plays in which the shift failed to prevent a hit, we found that most times the ball just went to a place where it normally wouldn’t—the result of a check swing, a broken bat or dumb luck.

So which team is the shift’s biggest beneficiary? The Houston Astros. The Astros are clobbering the rest of baseball, not just in the number of shifts employed but the number of hits saved in the process. Add back Houston’s 44 saved hits in our sample and the team’s pitchers would have yielded a .273 batting average to opponents, rather than .264.

Shifts also have wildly varying effects on hitters. David Ortiz, the Boston Red Sox slugger, was targeted with shifts more than 461 times, costing him 21 net hits and holding his batting average to .263 from a possible .306. By contrast, the New York Mets’ Lucas Duda (304) and the Washington Nationals’ Adam LaRoche (287) both saw roughly an equal number of shifts—but LaRoche had gained two net hits overall while Duda lost none.

In sum, the shift seems like a good idea, even if teams are still working out the kinks. One thing is for certain, though: moving a fielder 20 feet to prevent hits is certainly cheaper than spending millions on a pitcher to do the same. And the better a team shifts, the less it has to spend on great defenders (the kind who can’t hit).

—Steve Moyer works for Inside Edge, a baseball analytics company.