Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 779: Meet Major League Hitters’ Newest Nightmare

Episode Date: December 4, 2015

Ben and Sam talk to BP author Chris Mosch about the newest innovation in defensive positioning: the outfield shift.

I've got to play, I've got to listen to my toy Today I'm a motorway And I can feel the ground beneath my wheels Putting me back in my place And everything is falling into place And then we move again Good morning and welcome to episode 779 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives,

presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectives. Helloreference.com. I'm Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectives. Hello, Sam. Yo. Today we have a guest who, unlike our most recent guest, actually knew we were calling. He is Baseball Perspectives writer Chris Mosch, who does some of our favorite analytical articles for the site, and he is talking to us in beautiful Hawaii. Tomorrow he is leaving for the winter meetings where he's going to do something a little like

we talked to Andre Archimbo about earlier this week and look for jobs. And if you are someone who works for a baseball team, we think you should hire Chris. And we hope that you'll think the same after you hear him. Hello, Chris. Hey guys, thanks for having me. No problem.

So we are not going to talk to you about the winter meetings. We'll probably get our fill of winter meetings talk next week. So we want to talk about a subject that is close to my heart and close to yours. And you've probably written about it as much as anyone, maybe more than anyone over the past year or two at BP. And you are really interested, I think, as we are in the kind of cat and mouse metagame of baseball and shifts in tactics and then the responses to those changes in tactics. And so you've written a lot about infield shifting and the response to infield shifting. And now you're writing about outfield shifting, which we're going to ask about in a second.

But on the infield shift, you know, we often talk about why hitters don't just drop down more bunts. And we say, if you just drop down a bunt, then the other team will stop shifting and all your problems will be over. And you have watched a lot of games and footage to see whether this is the case. So is that true? I mean, if you're a hitter who gets shifted all the time, what do you have to do to stop getting shifted?

Yeah. I mean, I think that we've seen it a lot in the bunting to beat the shifts article that we did last year, that there are certainly cases where if you're a left handed hitter, and you're, you're dropping the bunt down, you're showing bunt constantly, I think it's, you're never exactly going to get the opposing defense to, you know, go to a standard defensive alignment against you i mean i think the spray charts kind of show what they're going to show and teams have kind of gotten to the point by now where they're going to try and optimize

their uh defensive positioning against you so i think that what i've seen at least is that kind of the best case scenario a lot of times that lefties are going to get is you know you might get them to go into a partial shift or to leave basically to leave the third baseman kind of at home until there's two strikes in the count right but but i mean i think that the important thing to note too is that when teams are defending against the shift it's a lot of times we think of just the pull side but it's you know that area kind of in the traditional shortstop area that matters too. So, you know, if you can even make it so that a defense has the full shift where they have the three infielders on the pull side, but they leave the third basement at home and kind of have the shortstop area left alone, you know, that's,

that can be considered a win too. Yeah. And do you have a theory? We've talked a bunch of times about how, you know, there's been this just enormous increase in the incidence of shifts and it's, you know, like seven times as many as there were in 2011 even. And yet the bad dip of the league has not really seemed to change all that much. It seems like when hitters put the ball in play, their average hasn't really decreased, although it seems to for certain guys. I don't know that either Samurai has really figured this out. Do you have a theory for why, even though defenses seem to have optimized what they're

doing or made it more optimal, it hasn't necessarily made a huge difference, at least league-wide? Right. I mean, I think John Duan has kind of talked about it before about how you know part of the reason that we don't see it show up as much as just because even though shifting I think as you said has increased so much and to us and to the naked eye it seems like it's taking up a good amount of the plays it's still only taking up such a you know it's kind of just a such a drop in the water of like all plays and you know

you're considering balls to the outfield as well and all that so I mean I think that that's my guess is that's the best explanation I mean I think you guys have talked in the show before about how you know hitters are getting stronger and there might be other kind of effects that are going in the opposite direction that might outweigh that. Okay, well, the infield shift is now passe. This is last season stuff. You have moved on to the outfield shift, which is the exciting new form of the shift. And so Mets fans might remember the so-called strawberry patch in right field at Shea Stadium, which was where Daryl Strawberry just stood in every game for every hitter because he didn't move from batter to batter. But that's not the norm.

The usual outfielder moves a bit here and there. That's been going on throughout all of baseball history. So what distinguishes the outfield shift or the new kind of outfield shifting from the usual sort of shading? Right. I mean, I think, especially when you compare it to infield shift, obviously you're not going to have quite as dramatic of a visual effect. I mean, I think just for one, the distribution of ground balls, I think is more pull heavy than in the outfield. It's kind of a little bit more evenly distributed. So I think

that first of all, you know, maybe this will change in the future, but I think that for the most part, you kind of have a lesser extreme of how far center fielder smack dab in the left center field gap, had the left fielder basically hugging the line against Maurer, having him play the opposite way. So I think that what kind of distinguishes it is, for the longest time, it's not like a center fielder shading one way or the other is a particularly new thing. I mean, that's kind of been going on for a while. A center fielder might be praised for having a good feel for the batter and having a good feel for the game or positioning. But, I mean, I think one of the more unique things about this

is how they're obviously constructed from the data and how we now have scouting reports and outfield coaches talking to players before games about particular hitters there. I found a couple of cases. One was Jacoby Ellsbury. He got caught on a Sunday night game. I think Harold Reynolds was talking about how you could see before every batter that he was looking into the brim of his hat and that he speculated that he had positional assignments on his hat. Kevin Kiermaier kind of had a similar case.

I've been kind of looking at him, and when I did my research for an article on him a couple months ago, I found a case of him taking out an index. It looked like an index card, and it seemed that there were positional assignments on there. So is it the same teams generally that are the most aggressive with infield shifting have been the most aggressive with that field shifting? I'd say that there's probably, you know, there's probably a relationship there. I mean, it would definitely make sense. It's kind of hard for me to say because, you know, we don't have necessarily the data. And while I've been kind

of scanning over some of these teams to do these articles, you know, it's kind of hard to, you know, see exactly what the Reds and the Brewers and, you know, every other team in baseball is doing. But I mean, I think it's interesting that the Royals, the Royals were certainly doing it to an extreme extent. I wrote an article for BP right before the World Series about how the Royals were kind of taking outfield shifts to an extreme against the Blue Jays, against Ben Revere and Ryan Goins to the opposite field, and then Bautista and then Carnacion to the pole side. So, I mean, I think we typically don't necessarily think of them as a team that shifts a lot.

I think they were middle of the pack this year, according to BIS. I think they were eighth or ninth in 2014. But, I mean, I think that it would certainly make sense you know one of the things about outfield shifting that i think could make it catch on fairly quick is just the pushback and how you know for infield shifting i think at first obviously we saw kind of the pushback especially with the astros and and how you know jeff luno had to had to kind of can that plan midseason because they weren't getting buy-in from the players. But I think if you have a team that's already bought in on the infield shifting,

it's kind of easier for the outfielders to be like, this is part of the program, and I think you're less likely to have pushback in those scenarios. Yeah, I thought that was interesting that the Astros, I mean, you talked about this partly in the context of them getting burned on one play, but their outfielders sticking to it and standing up for it. And it's interesting to kind of think that if you're trying to implement a bunch of weird things on the team level, it might not necessarily be that you have to win each battle.

It might be that it's just about maybe winning one battle and then having it be that battle kind of stand in for a general overall change where maybe everything gets a little easier after that because yeah the Astros it doesn't seem like they have the same issues with this it might also just be that when you tell an outfielder to stand 20 feet more shallow you're not telling him now you're a second baseman here he's still an outfielder he's still covering the range that he considers his range and you're just helping position him rather than moving him to the other side of the field. I wanted to ask though. So there's basically, there's kind of two factors at play and whether a shift works. One is do the hitters tendencies, are they consistent enough

that you can count on them and move over to cover them. And the other is how easy it is for that shift to be beat, how vulnerable you are to a change in approach. And with the infield, it seems like there's not that much vulnerability. Some hitters, like you guys just talked about, have shown an ability to make defenses back off. But for the most part, it's really hard to hit a ground ball the other way. It's easy to hit a fly ball the other way, but not a ground ball the other way. And if you do, you're taking them out of their area of strength and at most allowing a single. But if you bring the outfielder to the opposite field way in, is it

as hard to adjust and simply hit a medium deep fly ball to the opposite field? It seems like hitting medium deep fly balls to the opposite field is one of the easier things to do in baseball. And if you do it and expose a defense that is not playing you for that, it's not just a single anymore. Now it's a double or a triple. So the stakes are a little bit higher and maybe the opportunity for the offense is a little bit more wide open. Right. And I think one of the things that when I first looked into doing the research for this article was that I noticed was kind of the caliber of hitters that were getting shifted at first. And, you know, you look at Alcides Escobar and, you know, Paulo Orlando and some of these guys on the Royals who, you know, might not necessarily have the most power.

And, you know, I found examples of Ryan Goins and Anthony Gose, who, again, not exactly the most powerful dudes. But again, as you said, when you start doing these shifts on guys like Nick Castellanos or whoever it may be, you know, you have a case where, yeah, medium fly ball is going to be easier to fall in. I think one of the differences for the outfield compared to the infield especially in these cases is hang time I mean I think that as we saw in the original play that I kind of linked to in the article you know Escobar hit a fly ball that was basically almost in front of the warning track and Springer you know was playing very shallow in right field and he probably could have gotten

to it if he hadn't had miscommunication with his outfielder. So, I mean, I think that one of the differences is that that might be a little bit different for the spray charts with the infield is I think in the infield, a lot of times it's just, you know, you're kind of looking at where the hitter hits the most ground balls. We can kind of position your fielders accordingly. But I mean, I think for the outfield, you kind of have a case where, okay, the Astros are obviously trying to take away kind of short line drives and balls maybe with a three second hang time or lower kind of in that shallow range but i don't have i don't have information to back this up at the time but i would assume that kind of the deeper you would go the higher the hang time would be so i would assume that you

know maybe if maybe if you're looking at a spray chart and there's a high frequency of line drives kind of in that shallow area, but you can kind of still cover the five-second fly balls that may be medium depth or even medium deep depth. sense to, I think, alternate your corner outfielders based on handedness. One of the things that he included in that analysis, which I had not thought of, but which seemed really important and is important here, is that you're not just looking at how often guys hit the ball to various parts of the field for fly balls. You're looking at how likely they are to be hits, because a lot of, you know, a lot you might might hit, line drives might always be hits, but you know, high cans of corn might always be outs. If you think about a corner outfielder who fields a can of corn, he's basically sitting there for like four seconds, just waiting for it. Like you have a lot of margin for error there and you're really trying to look at where the hits are and if you can cut the hits off. And it's kind of different for the infield shift because if you leave an area exposed and a guy hits a slow roller there,

you might not have any margin for error if you don't have a guy standing there. Yeah, I think that's definitely right. I mean, I think that's probably one reason. I would venture that kind of the gaps in some of the other outfield shifts that we've seen, I would assume more line drives kind of to the gaps. But again, I'm not 100% sure on kind of what the aggregate data says in terms of how more likely a line drive is to be to the gap than, you know, to straightaway left field or straightaway center field. So you mentioned that the typical outfield shift candidate is a little bit different from the typical infield shift candidate. And with the infield shift, we think of the huge, burly, left-handed slugger who can't run but hits the ball really hard and pulls a ton. And obviously the infield shift has been expanded to cover other types of hitters because it turns out that lots of hitters pull the ball on the ground, and even right-handers do enough to make a shift make sense. But how does the outfield shift

candidate differ, or who are some of the best candidates that you have come across? Yeah, I think it's kind of interesting, because, you know, with the infield shift, you know, basically everybody's tendency is kind of to pull and that's not necessarily the case for the outfield as kind of the royals showed you know you have cases where you have the slap hitting guy who goes the opposite way a lot like joe mauer or some of the guys i think who are on the top of my list where you know kind of ichiro adam eaton d or in those type of guys that you would kind of expect to play the other way but there's also the case of there are guys who pull the ball who tend to pull the ball extremely to the um pull

side like Encarnacion and Bautista I haven't um gone quite as deep into some of the pull guys yet but I mean I think that's as you said that's one of the interesting things about the outfield that makes them different you kind of can have an alignment for every type of player i think that is the shift is evolving i think especially for us and kind of visually seeing it the reaction is you know who it's it's almost like a binary thing for the infield shift sometimes where you're kind of thinking okay is the guy in a shift or is the guy not in a shift i I mean, I think for the teams, when it comes down to it, they're just trying to – the teams that are really invested in this, I think, are really just trying to find an optimal alignment for every single guy. And I think they could be damned if whatever service, whether it's BIS or Inside Edge, whether they mark it as a shift or not. or inside edge, whether they mark it as a shift or not.

I mean, I think that as long as the teams are getting the results that they want and that they're limiting as many hits on balls in play as they can, I mean, I think that they'll do it for Joe Maurer or they'll do it for Jose Bautista if they think that it's the right thing. And you mentioned that outfield hits are generally more evenly distributed than infield hits. So do you have any sense of how common an extreme outfield shift candidate is? I mean, if you're preparing for an upcoming series, is there, you know, one guy on the team who has a strange enough or unusual enough outfield spray chart that you would consider

doing something? Is it two guys? Is it no guys on some team? Any idea? Right. I think that it's probably one or two. Sounds about right. I think from one of the articles that I wrote about kind of looking at some guys who might be good candidates, I think that I had about a top 20 and even like 20th place was like a 60 or 62% opposite field rate and that's including center field so the opposite field of dead center. So yeah, it's not the most extreme of things so maybe it's not the type of thing that a

casual fan might notice if you're not looking super hard for it because it might just be a couple steps over. But I think as the Astros showed in the Royals series where they basically had some variation of it on about six guys, it's the type of thing where if you have your scouting report and I guess if maybe in the extreme cases it's five or six, maybe it's just that the Royals have an inordinate amount of guys who slap the ball the other way. But I think that I think about one or two on average sounds about right. And do you think of it as more of a lateral adjustment or more of a depth adjustment? Because I mean, I guess the, the equivalent counterintuitiveness of this would be playing in.

And I remember speaking to someone when the StatCast data started coming out, or maybe it was even FieldFX data at that point, and he was saying that he thought that the big change on defense was going to be that outfielders would start playing in more and that it seemed like the stats would support that. And I guess the ask that would be the toughest of players is to play in, as Sam mentioned, because then you're leaving yourself vulnerable to a deep fly ball that falls in or something that would have been a routine fly ball that falls in. And that's kind of the analog to leaving a big hole in the infield. So is it more that guys just play in to a greater degree

than would have been considered safe before? Or is it leaving big gaps in an alley? That's interesting. I think that it is more likely to be lateral. I think that, I mean, that would be interesting to kind of see a study of that StatCast data and stuff because I know that when I was doing my research for the Kevin Kiermaier article a couple months ago, that I found that he was actually playing deeper this year.

And kind of the BIS data that I was able to get kind of backed that up. And that he was basically converting a lot more deep balls into outs. And obviously, those are going to have higher run values attached to them because you're taking away extra hit, extra bases rather than singles. So, I mean, I think it's interesting because obviously you're going to play it from batter to batter. So, I mean, I don't think that there's necessarily an either-or because I don't think we're ever going to get to the point where you're going to have Miguel Cabrera or David Ortiz you're going to where you're going to have the center fielder playing super shallow I mean I think that that just wouldn't make sense and probably

wouldn't align with the spray charts I think basically in both cases both laterally and you know shallow and deep I think as it's been for a long time, you kind of have a lot of fielders and a lot of defensive alignments kind of clustered around a certain center point, like a median. So I mean, I think maybe rather than whether it's going to be more lateral or more shallow deep,

it might just be that we see more variance. It might be both ways. It might be we see more guys playing in the gap compared to straightaway center, more guys shallow, more guys deep. It might be a little bit of both, but I think that ultimately it would just be kind of just more away from the traditional norm of just having the guy playing a foot or two either way in center field. to either way in center field. And what stats would you want to study if you were an advanced scout for a team and you had access to whatever data a team has? I mean, is it just looking at a spray chart, which any of us can do? Does that get you most of the way there? Or what other elements do you want to take into account when you're deciding where to position someone in the outfield? I think that to a degree,

I mean, you've definitely got to consider, obviously, the handedness of both your batter and the pitcher, whether the hitter has the platoon advantage and all that. But I think that also, you know, kind of playing into the tendencies a little bit of your own particular pitcher probably plays some difference too. I mean, I think that for a given hitter, you're going to have kind of an aggregate idea of what his tendencies are. You know, it hardly matters what pitching matchup you're going to have. You know, the spray charts are going to say

that David Ortiz is going to hit the majority of his balls to the right side of the field. But I mean, I think that after you kind of have that overarching tendency of the hitter, you can kind of play around with the tendencies of your own pitcher. I mean, I think that you obviously don't want to get to the point where you have your second baseman or your shortstop going more to the pull side based on whether the pitcher is going to throw a curveball or a changeup on that given pitch because you're going to be tipping pitches. But i think that we see this a lot now with teams shifting within counts and i think

a lot of times especially with announcers you kind of hear people surprised when uh infield kind of plays more to the pull side in a two strike count because i think that the the idea is that the hitters you know he's kind of he's in protect mode and he's going to foul pitches off and he's going to try and do what he can to get on base and kind of go the other way if he has to. So, I mean, I think that that kind of comes off as counterintuitive. But if you think about it and, you know, it's a two-strike count, your pitcher's probably going to be throwing more breaking balls or more off-street pitches, certainly fewer fast

balls. And you would think that that kind of plays into the hitter being a little bit more pull-friendly. So, I mean, I think that it's a good place to start the overall spray charts. But I think that teams are definitely adjusting based on all these little things. And that's why you see this shift so specialized from a batter-pitcher matchup. so specialized this shift so specialized from a batter pitcher matchup and from i think you often see it um with handedness where a guy might be shifted earlier in the game against the right handed starter but then the lefty comes in later in the game and it's you know more of a partial shift i mean i think that's evidence of all the tweaking that um some of the more aggressive

teams and the teams that are investing more resources and thought into it are kind of going into. All right. So I have a question that is not particularly serious, but kind of. I've always wondered, one of my great wonders in baseball is how the defense would play if they, for some reason, had to only have eight men on the field. for some reason had to only have eight men on the field. And now that you've seen all these different shifts where teams have chosen to leave certain parts of the field more unoccupied than usual in order to try to get an advantage. If there was a scenario where a team could only have eight defenders, I want to know who you think they would remove. And I'm going to give you three different types of hitters as kind of like archetypes for these various types of hitters. And you tell me which position comes off the field. Okay. So the most extreme type of hitters as kind of like archetypes for these various types of hitters and you tell me which position comes off the field okay uh so the most uh extreme type of hitter would be the david ortiz

type of lumbering left-handed slugger where do you pull from my guess would be third base you'd probably my guess would be you'd leave the entire uh left side of the infield open and do the maybe you don't necessarily do three on the right side, maybe do two and like guy a little bit to the left of second base. But my guess is you'd probably pull the third baseman there. Okay. So other than the third baseman, who's kind of hanging out around shortstop, it would look more or less like we see now, except maybe not quite so much of a pull in the infield. Right. Okay. Then a guy who's like sort of a slap hitter who you don't really think of as power base like Alcides Escobar, but without quite the same directional tendencies.

Hmm. Like, I still don't think you would pull the outfielder just because, I mean, I think for one, you know, the teams are trying to take that away. But again, it's kind of like pros versus cons. I mean, if you only have two outfielders, and I'll see this Escobar bloops one, bloops a soft liner over the infield, you know, got a possible triple there.

So I think that, I think I'd still go with the three-man infield, but that's tough. I could see, depending on like your personnel, if you have like two, you know, I think the classic one that we think about is having the two, you know, if you have Jackie Bradley and Kevin Kiermaier in the outfield and you have them like roaming and covering everything. But absent that, I would, I guess I would still go infield, but that's pretty close.

Maybe the two answers combined answer this one. But a guy who is more or less well-rounded, some tendencies but not extreme, and has the power like, say, Mike Moustakas. I think you're still going to pull the infielder. I think just because all hitters kind of have some degree of pull tendency. And I guess there's just less risk involved. And I think that even if we think of our non-traditional shift guys, guys who you might not shift otherwise, they're still pulling the ball 55, 60% of the time. So I'd probably still go with that.

Okay. And then one last thing. What year will we see the first five-man infield in a sort of non-walk-off situation? I still don't think it's for a while, maybe 2020 maybe. All right, all right, okay. Sounds good. You can hold me to that. And my last question, what do you think people should do with stats? How should we adjust our defensive statistics to account for positioning once we know what the positioning is? Because you've written about Kevin Kiermaier. You mentioned just checking these positioning instructions.

And probably he is not studying the spray charts himself and writing that down. He's probably getting those instructions from a coach. And so you could imagine a case where a defender just gets a great defensive rating because he's on a team where the coaches or the front office or whoever is really thorough about preparing for opposing hitters. And they tell him where to stand and he stands there and he gets to every ball and he gets a great defensive rating. And then he goes to a different team where there isn't so much preparation and suddenly he doesn't know where to stand and he doesn't know what to do. And his defense appears to regress, even though he was the same guy all along. So is there a solution for that, really?

Or is it just kind of buyer beware thing once teams get aggressive about this and there's a lot of variation between teams where you have to be aware of why a guy has good positioning right i mean i think that's that's obviously the toughest part and i think that my guess would be that with kind of with increased access to the stat cast data that we'd kind of have a better idea you know i mean if you're just if you're kind of just judging kind of the distance covered and and you know obviously that takes into account kind of a starting position. I mean, I think that if you kind of have distance covered from that starting position and kind of have that for all fielders, you kind of have a center point. So maybe it's the type of thing where, you know, we see it for the inside edge and, you know, the remote balls and even and unlikely balls. And that's obviously, that's kind of how it is now when we visually judge players and kind of in some sense, how some of the metrics don't take into consideration the starting points. I mean, I think that kind of once that you have a center point

and are able to judge everybody on that one scale, maybe that's something that we'll be able to come to. But as you said, I mean, that's something that we'll be able to come to. But as you said, I mean, that's the most difficult part about it all. Yeah. Okay. Well, if you are on the internet, you can find Chris at Baseball Prospectus and on Twitter at Chris underscore Mosch, M-O-S-C-H. If you're at the winter meetings, you can find him probably wandering the halls, possibly wearing a suit, carrying some resumes. If anyone interviews you and asks you the eight men on the field question, you will be well-prepped. Good luck in Nashville, and thanks for coming on.

Thanks a lot, guys. All right, so that is it for us this week. You can send us emails for next week at podcast.baseballperspectives.com. Our Facebook group is at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. You can rate and review and subscribe to the show on iTunes and support our sponsor, The Play Index, by going to baseballreference.com, using the coupon code BP, and getting a discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription.

Have a nice weekend. We will talk to you on Monday. Oh, I will be right by you where you stop. will talk to you on Monday.