The Shift by Russell A. Carleton

Author:Russell A. Carleton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Triumph Books
Published: 2018-01-31T05:00:00+00:00

(Note: Only shifts that resulted in a ball put into play were counted)

In 2010, the league leader in shifts (the ever-tinkering Tampa Bay Rays and their forward-thinking manager Joe Maddon) employed the strategy about three times as often as the team in the middle of the pack and 13 times as often as the team at the low end of the scale. By 2017, the gaps were not so large. Even the non-believers were shifting. The 30th place team in 2017 (the Chicago Cubs and their hyper-reactionary manager Joe Maddon) would have led the league in shifts as late as 2011, and the team at the top (the Milwaukee Brewers) shifted a little more than five times as much as the last place team. Things were getting closer, but even after seven years, there were still significant differences between teams that fully embraced the strategy and those who were more tentative.

There was plenty of initial resistance to the shift for the same reason that there’s opposition to any shift in thinking: it was weird. Pitchers grew up in a world where defenses lined up in a two left–two right formation. Consciously and unconsciously, over years of repetition, they had tailored their strategies to this set of assumptions. Sure, teams had a long history of moving their fielders a jump to the left or a step to the right depending on the hitter, but moving a fielder 30 or 40 feet is a very different proposition.

There was psychological resistance too. Loss aversion, which we discussed in Chapter 3, rears its head again. The shift inevitably produces a ground ball hit directly at a fielder who is playing in an odd place. It would have been a base hit if the team had lined up in a traditional formation, but with the shift on, it’s an out. Success! The problem is that the shift also produces a few ground balls that scoot through into left field exactly past the place where the third baseman would “normally” have been playing. Mathematically, as long as the shift is producing more outs-that-would-have-been-hits than it does hits-that-would-have-been-outs, then it’s a net winner. Unfortunately, that’s not how the human mind works. Humans are more disturbed by “losing” an out that they could have had than they are by gaining one that they otherwise wouldn’t have gotten. The shift felt icky, but baseball eventually embraced it.

* * *

Now that the shift has become a part of daily life, with even the least shifty team using the strategy a couple of times per game, why hasn’t bunting against the shift developed as a countermeasure?

Table 20. Bunts Against the Shift, by Year, 2010–2017

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