With just two weeks down in this baseball season — if we were at a football game, there would be roughly 11:11 left in the first quarter — the Yankees are on pace to win two more games than last year. Hit 18 more home runs.
And save 22 more runs via the defensive shift.
Yes, the Yankees have become hard-core believers in the shift. If the quality of their infield has dropped precipitously, with a new guy expected in time for Tuesday night’s game against the Cubs at Yankee Stadium, then they are getting far more bang for their buck.
“You’re going to be burned on it,” Billy Eppler, the Yankees’ assistant general manager/pro personnel, said Monday in a telephone interview. “You just want to have more instances of run-saving circumstances than run-yielding circumstances.”
So far, they have succeeded at that goal. Heading into Monday’s action, according to Baseball Info Solutions, the Yankees were tied with four other clubs — the Astros, Brewers, Cardinals and Athletics — with the major league-leading total of two team shift runs saved. Last year, the Yankees tallied three team shift runs saved for the entire season.
Shifts are up throughout the industry, and they are producing reactions as well as results. Some traditionalists shake their fists at the rejiggered formations that play tricks on the eyes and make life difficult for heavy pull hitters, especially.
“It’s a number of at-bats over a period of time that shows where they hit the ball the most often,” Joe Girardi said. “That’s basically what it comes down to.”
Like expanded instant replay, interleague schedules and night games, however, the shifts probably are here to stay. Because they’re working more than they aren’t. The Yankees used the shift 475 times last year, and they’re already at 88 in 2014, second in the majors behind only Houston (137). If they keep this up, they’ll wind up doing so well over 1,000 times.
“If you had a crystal ball, if you could conceive of what happens before it happens — if you could jump in your DeLorean and go back in time — you could turn every ball in play into an out,” Eppler said, slipping in an excellent “Back to the Future” reference. “A perfect opponents’ BABiP (batting average on balls in play) is .000. The average is between .302 and .305. You want to beat that. If you beat that, you’re going to be pleased.”
The Yankees’ opponents’ BABiP is .296.
With 475 last year, the Yankees ranked eighth in shifts, so they hardly trailed the pack. Nevertheless, they decided to amp it up this year, and they implemented their plan slowly since the start of spring training. Armed with data from Michael Fishman, the team’s director of quantitative analysis, “It takes a unified effort to make the concept a reality,” Eppler said. The Yankees discussed it and practiced it at the outset of spring training, and they started utilizing it in Grapefruit League games starting in mid-March.
Ben Jedlovec, BIS’ vice president of product development and sales, explained how the “shift runs saved” are compiled. BIS analyses track each hit and measure how often the “standard” defense would have made a play as opposed to a shift defense.
“Let’s say there’s a ball that’s in the hole between first and second. Without the shift, the defense will get the out 50 percent of the time,” Jedlovec said. So if the shifted infield makes the play — think of how the Yankees’ Brian McCann hit into a 6-3 out in the eighth inning Sunday night, with Boston’s Xander Bogaerts positioned in short right field — then you reward the team with a half-play, which amounts to about one-third of a run.
Now, on the flip side, if a lefty batter strokes a grounder to shortstop, that’s an out 95 percent of the time with a standard defense. So if that hit beats the shift, you penalize the team by 95 percent of a play, which is about -.72 runs.
Last year, the Rays — widely viewed as the industry forefathers of the shift — led the majors with 16 shift runs saved, followed by the Red Sox with 15. It appears quite likely that this season’s leaders will exceed that by a considerable margin. And even such numbers don’t tell the whole story.
“Of course,” Jedlovec noted in an email, “this does not include the mental impact of a shift, often throwing opposing hitters off their offensive comfort zone.”
Most hitters don’t concede this publicly; Yankees first baseman Mark Teixeira has continually turned down the idea of dropping a grounder the other way — or even bunting — to thwart the shift.
In an interview with MLB.com last year, Cincinnati lefty slugger Jay Bruce said: “All in all, I believe shifts make sense, especially against guys hitting for power. Not a lot of power-hitting guys hit the ball on the ground on the left side of the infield. But it’s one of those things where I don’t even worry about it or look at it, because it’s not worth it. If I do what I’m supposed to do, it doesn’t matter anyway.”
Of course, even the game’s best sluggers do what they’re supposed to a small fraction of the time. Teams like the Yankees now hope that, by playing the percentages, they can mitigate the damage when they don’t serve up a gopher ball.
The shift isn’t as romantic as Derek Jeter’s jump-and-throw from the hole, or McCann gunning down a potential base stealer. But with the Yankees’ strengths and flaws evident for all to see so far, why shouldn’t they develop another path to victories?