With Bryce Harper having a bit of a down year in his free agent season, the question is whether his numbers this year are just a quirk, the kind of one-off bad season that stars sometimes have (see, for example, Ernie Banks in 1963 and Ron Santo in 1962), or are the result of something else, i.e., defensive shifts. Baseball America had an article recently about how defensive shifts are especially hurting left-handed pull hitters. Like Bryce Harper.
When Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred was asked a couple of years ago about the effect shifts might have on the amount of offense in baseball, he said his expectation was that hitters would adjust. Well, they haven’t. You get the occasional single to left field or bunt down the third base line by a left-handed power hitter, but you are not seeing any significant amount of Wee Willie Keeler “hit-‘em-where-they-ain’t” hitting. There are probably a couple of reasons for this. First, the money isn’t in hitting singles to the opposite field.1 Second, and perhaps more important, that’s not how these guys have hit their entire life. They were taught to pull the ball. They were brought up hitting the ball to right field. It’s what they do. You can’t change that overnight.
One final point. It’s too bad, with all the talk about shifting, there hasn’t been more mention of the man who invented the shift: Lou Boudreau.3 It’s easy to use shifts today, with all of the computer-driven analytics telling you where to position your fielders. If you know where somebody has hit the ball in the past, it’s easy to tell your defense where to play. Also, the more teams that shift, the easier it is to do. Because it’s not weird. In fact, nowadays you would have to explain yourself if you didn’t shift.
That’s not the way it was in 1946. Back then, you didn’t have computer-generated spray charts showing where batters hit the ball. Everybody played their fielders in the same place. But Cleveland Indians manager Lou Boudreau saw what Ted Williams was doing, and he knew he had to do something. So he came up with the idea of putting six players on the right side of the diamond: all four infielders and two outfielders.4 The only man on the left side was the left fielder, who basically played a very deep shortstop.
Did it work? In his first at bat against the shift, Williams grounded out to Boudreau, who as shortstop was playing in the normal second baseman’s position. But Boudreau himself said that he "always considered the ‘Boudreau Shift’ against Williams a psychological, if not always a tactical, victory."5 In other words, Boudreau was trying to get in Ted Williams’ head. One wonders if that is the one of the effects of shifting today. Are batters are getting so spooked about hitting into the shift, and frustrated when they do, that they are thinking about the shift when they ought to be focusing on hitting the ball?
In any case, when we see defenses shifting today, we should remember the original – the “Boudreau shift” – and the baseball genius behind it.6
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1 In this regard, I note that, of Willie Keeler’s 2932 career hits, 2513 were singles. Even in his time, that was a lot of singles. Singles are great, but “Chicks love the long ball” – and that’s where the money is.
2 I doubt Scott Boras will agree.
3 Or at least revived it. See here.
4 Lou Boudreau and Russell Schneider, Covering All The Bases (1993), p. 82-85.
5 Boudreau, p. 85.
6 A final note on Lou Boudreau. While he played fifteen seasons, in two of them he only played a coup[le of games. Of his other thirteen seasons, he managed nine of them. While I don’t know for sure, he is very likely the only person in the Hall of Fame who was a player-manager most of his career (at least since the modern era began in 1920). Boudreau also became Cleveland’s manager at the age of 24. How likely is that today?
UPDATE (8/25/18 11:50 pm): The Baseball America article is "Shifting Value," by Jerry Crasnick, in the August 24, 2018 issue.
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