99% Invisible - 234- The Shift

Episode Date: November 2, 2016

Every now and again, a truly great athlete shatters all previous assumptions about what’s possible to achieve in a sport. When this happens, opposing teams scramble to find ways to stop them or slow them down. In basketball, teams tried … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. One of the most exciting things in sports is to see a truly great player shatter all previous assumptions about what is possible to achieve in the game. But while fans applaud and announcers lose their minds, opposing teams scrambled to find strategies to stop these grades. In basketball they tried to stop Shaquille O'Neill by immediately fouling him when he got the ball so that he'd have to shoot from the free throw line, which he wasn't very good at. This strategy became known as the Hacker Shack. As we immediately have a Hacker Shack call, I don't believe it. Five seconds in. In soccer, opposing teams continuously filed the great Argentinian player Leo Messi to keep

him from dribbling through their defense. It's right over the top into the knee of Messi's patch. It is absolutely scandalous. These tactics to stop the great players can be aggressive, and they often stretch the limits of the rulebook. That's Neil Payne bringing us our story today. He's from 538, the data journalism site owned by ESPN. But in baseball, they did it differently. In baseball, the solution to stopping the greatest hitter of all time was to actually redesign

the game itself. It all started in the 1940s with the great Ted Williams. Famously, he would say that when he grew up he wanted to be the greatest hitter or whoever lived. Ben Bradley Jr. wrote the definitive biography of Ted Williams. Before a game in the clubhouse, he would put up a mirror and strip down to his skivvy's and swing a bat and say, I'm Ted Williams, I'm the best f***er and hitter who ever lived. Pardon my French. Not a humble man, Ted Williams, but also not wrong. In 1941, the young Red Sox superstar finished the year with a batting average of 406,

meaning that he got a hit in over 40% of his at-bats, which is incredibly good. No one has batted above 400 since Ted Williams. The greatest hitter of them all. And Williams kept it up. He even left to fight in World War II, came back, and was still the best hitter in baseball. But in 1946, just as Ted Williams was on track for another record-breaking year, he came face-to-face with someone hell-bent on ending his streak. A guy with the Cleveland baseball team named Lu Boudreau. Boudreau was a shortstop for the Indians, but he was also the manager of the team. Because back then, you could actually be both a player and a manager at the same time. He was an incredibly ambitious person and a great player. But despite Boudreau's success, there was this other player that got all the attention.

Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived. Williams got most of the headlines, praise, for as what of being such a great hitter. That's Russell Schneider. He covered the Indians for the Cleveland plane dealer and became close with Lou Boudreau. Knowing Boudreau as I think I did, there's no doubt that this was a clash of he goes between Williams and Boudreau. But Boudreau had a plan. He knew that Williams almost always hit the ball to the right side of the field between first and second base. As the Indians manager, he could actually set up his team's strategy specifically to beat Williams. The boys whispered that Blue Bull Drow, Cleveland manager, is running the Midnight Oil for facting a new type of defense for them.

Blue said to Hound, and he said, I'm tired of having Williams beat us. And this is what I want to do. Blue Bull Drow decided that he would shift three players from the left side of the field to the right. He put a wall of three infielders between first and second base with a trio of outfielders backed up behind them. Now six of the seven defenders were standing on the right side of the field. Only one lonely outfielder remained on the left.

The familiar symmetry of the baseball diamond had been disrupted. And with it, the Ted Williams shift was born. I call it the budro shift. Some people call it the defensive shift or just the shift. The first time budro used the shift on Williams was July 14, 1946 at Fenway Park. When Williams stepped into the plate and saw the shift for the first time, he said the umpire, what the hell is going on out there?

They can't do that. But they could, totally legal. And so Williams had a choice. Swing just like he'd always swung, and he might hit a home run. But he might also hit the ball into the crowd to defend her, shifted to his right. Or he could go outside his comfort zone and try to hit the ball to the left.

Boudreau knew that it would be difficult for Ted to alter his swing, so I'm self as a slugger, a home run hitter, and therefore he would continue doing it his way. That's been Bradley again, who wrote the Ted Williams biography. He was appealing to Williams' pride. And it worked. The first time Williams came up to bat, he hit straight into the teeth of the shift. In fact, he hit the baseball right to Boudreau himself, standing directly between first and second

base. Boudreau kept using the shift on Williams, and pretty soon, other teams were using it against him too. It wasn't long at all. Maybe within a week or two that the rest of the American League was adopting it. Williams argued that, no, he wasn't going to alter his natural swing, that the fans were showing up at the park to see him hit. In interviews, Williams said he thought the shift shaved about 15 points off of his

lifetime batting average. In fact, it's probably the only tactic that ever actually had an effect on Ted Williams. Eventually, Ted Williams retired, and the shift, it more or less disappeared from baseball. A lot of managers were hesitant to use it, because it didn't always work. When it goes bad, you look bad. This is John DeWon, the author of the Fielding Bible, and a guy you'd be safe calling the Godfather of Shift Data. And he says, for a long time,

teams didn't have the kind of data that would back up the idea that risk would pay off over time. You know, there weren't real strong analytics back in the 70s and 80s that could tell you this kind of thing would work. But then Saber metrics came along. Saber metrics is a movement in baseball that started in the 90s to collect data and study it to find advantages. Suddenly, GMs and front offices across the major leagues were focused on this idea that to win without spending much money, all you had to do was look at the numbers.

Enter the Tampa Bay rays, formerly known as the Devil Rays. It was regarded as maybe the worst franchise in all of baseball for quite a while. That's Jonah Kerry, a journalist who wrote a book about the Rays. They just didn't really understand what it took to win. This is bad baseball. Four defensive miscues have cost the double raise dearly in the eighth. But things started changing for the race in the mid-2000s. Stuart Sternberg, former partner Goldman Sachs, decided he was going to buy the team.

And with him, he brought a bunch of other Wall Street types. You know, number guys, quants. Guys who were good at using data to find hidden advantages. His theory was, let's just succeed and be 2% better than the competition. The raised number cruncher studied the data, and they discovered a really efficient tactic that could help their fielding in defense. A tactic dredged up from baseball's distant past. You guessed it, the defensive shift.

The shift really is a perfect example of an extra 2% advantage, because the shift frankly doesn't work all the time. In fact, it fails quite a bit. But the rays didn't have much to lose, so they decided to take a risk and bring back the shift. And they hire manager for the team who's on board with their plan, a guy by the name of Joe Madden. And right away, Madden starts using the shift on all kinds of different hitters.

Joe Madden, he's got the doctor and the master of the defensive shift. Interesting shift, we haven't really seen one like this against Hardy. But Joe Madden has come up with all kinds of interesting shifts this year. I mean, you don't really ride C, this type of shift all that often against a guy like Peralta. And all of a sudden, it's just this disaster of a team. Become this airtight team that you can't score runs off their pitchers. Ground ball to second. He'll ever have his gun.

Raise your gun. From nowhere, they transformed themselves from a perpetual dormant to a championship contender. And the shift was right at the center of their resurgence. The shift caught on. All of a sudden, every team the league started shifting. In fact, other teams began shifting against the Rey's own best hitters, including this guy. My name is Carlos Pena, and I play

Major League Baseball for 14 seasons. Carlos Pena grew up playing baseball as a kid in the Dominican Republic, and being a power hitter, he believed, was his ticket to the US. We swing our way off the island, we have to, that's the way we were taught. If we want to make it to Medjolique, you better be swinging for some power. Carlos Panias, and there's a fly ball deep to right field, way back to the Lanskore. And swing for power, he did.

Carlos Panias hit 46 home runs in 2007 while playing for the raise. Right around the same time, Joe Madden was reintroducing the shift to the major leagues. And there's a high fly ball back into right field. Go! Pena hits number 46.

That was 2007. I had 46. 2008, I had the shift on me. And the shift is absolutely a killer. Ground ball, right into the teeth of the shift that Lopez from short right field throws out Pavia, wind and pits to him, and he swings. You know, like, wait a second, you know,

is this good the way he's going to be, you know, for the rest of my career? And sure enough, that's exactly what happened. And he lied to this one right to Johnson, who had him played between first and second in the shift. Even the grades like Panieth can't hit home runs all the time. When Panieth was shifted on, he had to make a decision. Do I swing my natural swing and maybe get a home run, or maybe hit straight into the shift, or do I change my

swing? Eventually, unlike Williams, whose ego led him to try to power through the shift, Pena started to adopt another tactic. He did something Ted Williams had only tried a handful of times during his whole career. Shift is on for Pania. And he bunched the ball third base side. Carlos Pania, bunched. The humble bunch. There's nothing pretty about this move.

You just kind of bonk the ball with your bat and it dribbles out onto the field. Bunting was something that players traditionally did just to move their teammates from one base to another. For Carlos, Pania turned the Bunt into his own secret weapon. Using the Bunt, Pania could tap the ball toward third base, where no one was around to pick it up. And it worked a lot of the time, even if he didn't always feel good about using it. It felt like I was giving in. You know, like I was saying, okay, you guys got me. I'm just gonna buy.

That's kind of silly, but in reality, sometimes there's prideful athletes. We think that. Like, no, man, play the game. Payne knew he had the swallow is prined, but it went against everything he had learned growing up. I grew up watching home runs, home runs, home runs. And all I wanted to do was hit home runs. That's what was celebrated.

You know, no one said, that's great bun, son. Yeah. PANYES Buns, though, they were actually great. At one point in his career, he was 15 for 25 on Buns against the ship. Carlos PANYO becomes one of the most prolific bunters in the majors against the shift. Fast ball inside.

And it's buttoned. How about that? Great play. A two strike button by Pena. Pena says his success at combating the shift has actually changed the way the game has played, but he's not happy about it. Man, the shift is played, but he's not happy about it. The shift is just a...hemmises. A shift is something that I wish they could get rid of.

New baseball commissioner Rob Manfred actually agrees with painting. He is talking to ESPN about how he wants to improve the game. Things like eliminating shifts, I would be open to those sorts of ideas. Manfred thinks the shift makes the game less exciting because it makes it harder for teams to score runs. He also thinks it's just happening too much now. In many ways the fight about the shift has become a fight over the nature of the game. Ever since say, Rometrics came along, baseball fans and pundits and players have bristled at the idea that on-field decisions are basically a product of data analysis.

That could be maddening to many players, it's like, wait, this kid from Harvard, who has never thrown a baseball. It's deciding my future. Oh, that anger's, players like you wouldn't believe. But unless there's a rule change, the field will keep shifting because it works. Oh, it's huge. It is really huge. According to John DeWan, the author of The Fielding Bible, it can help win about three extra

games a year, which is significant. Three wins, I think every single year, has separated a team from getting into the playoffs or not. Teams are not going to give up that competitive advantage. So now it's a fight between the number guys and the traditionalists, between the nerds and the jocks to decide the design of the game. In the meantime, if my boys ever decide to take a baseball, I'm going to make sure and tell them, great fun, son. 99% of visible was a collaboration this week with 538, the data journalism site owned by ESPN. It was produced by Joe Sykes with editing from Jodi Abergan, and adapted for 99PI by Katie Mingle.

Special thanks to Sports Reporter Neil Payne. Neil is a panelist on 538 Sports Podcast Hot Take Down, and they're doing a whole series of documentaries called Ahead of Their Time, about players and coaches who were doing something radical, but weren't appreciated in their era. You can find them all at 538.com slash podcasts or by searching Hot Take Down in your favorite podcast app. 99% of visible is the aforementioned Katie Mingle Plus, Kurt Coles that Sheree Fusef, Sam Greenspan, Avery Trollman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Taren Mazza, Delaney Hall, and me Roman Mars.

We are a project of 91.7KALW San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in Beautiful, Downtown, Oakland, California. To all the beautiful nerds out there who donated during our fundraiser, thank you so much and thanks to Pogister Magazine and Fresh Books for putting up generous challenge grants that motivated us to hit our goals in the wee hours of the morning. Our listener support makes us strong and helps us try new things. It wouldn't be radio-topia without you. You can find the show in join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 999PI-ORG.

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