Think of the shift in baseball like a zone defense, as an attempt to put as many players in an area as possible to stop an opponent from doing what he likes to do best.
If we coached a basketball team and our strength was to throw the ball in the low post and a rival played a pack-in zone, the reaction would be to use our best shooters to shoot over the zone as a way to force the rival to either extend the zone or come out of it altogether so we can go back to doing what we like to do.
In the NFL, top quarterbacks such as Tom Brady and Peyton Manning are renowned for taking what the defense gives them. If a foe is taking away the long pass, they will respond by working underneath and methodically moving down field.
So as shifts have gone from few to trendy to rampant in the majors, the question is: What will the offense do to counter? Essentially, will hitters defiantly keep hitting into the shift? Or will there be an offensive movement to more opposite-field hitting and bunting, at least as an attempt to get the opponent out of the shift so players can go back to doing what they like?
"Our sport — less than football or basketball — tends to rely on 'play to your strengths' as opposed to 'take what the opponent is giving you,' " Padres general manager Josh Byrnes said. "Maybe playing to strengths is necessary for the psyche in a failure-driven sport. I would think in the strikeout era, we could see a re-emergence of bat-control skills being valued. Unfortunately, many current players know how to launch but do not know how to manipulate the bat."
This is central to the argument: Do players have the skills to change their style? As one AL personnel head said, "Yes, Peyton Manning and Tom Brady can throw short or long or intermediate if necessary, but could Jeff George? Robinson Cano and Miguel Cabrera can use the whole field, but it is easier to say, 'Let the ball travel deeper to go the opposite way,' or 'Wait for a certain pitch you can drive to the opposite field' than actually doing it when you have a blink of the eye to react."
Power hitters, in particular, have tended to live under a belief that trying to bunt or go the other way might come on the exact pitch they could drive for extra bases — which is what they are paid to do.
"The billion-dollar question is whether or not batters can really easily control the direction of the ball in play and what the cost is of attempting to control it," said Astros GM Jeff Luhnow, whose team deploys the most shifts by far.
Nevertheless, the anecdotal and statistical evidence is growing that a counter-attack has begun. It was not long ago that shifts were used for just the mightiest of lefty hitters — such as Ken Griffey, David Ortiz and Jim Thome. But now there are shifts for mild power lefties like Kelly Johnson or limited power lefties such as Ryan Fletcher, and an expanding number of clubs are shifting against righty hitters.
On Tuesday vs. the Angels, both Asdrubal Cabrera and Carlos Santana bunted for hits against the shift — Santana defied two longstanding no-nos: He bunted for the hit as a cleanup hitter and with two outs. Brian McCann clearly is trying to drive the ball to the opposite field more.
"Maybe you don't change if a few teams are doing it to a few players," Yankees hitting coach Kevin Long said, "but if every team is doing it …"
Bunt attempts were up to 1,031 this year compared to 920 over a corresponding period last season, according to Baseball Info Solutions.
And we can expect this give-and-take to continue. The shift is here to stay, though there is a class of "traditionalists" bemoaning the implementation.
If there were computers 150-ish years ago when the game was first invented, it would have been used to arrange the players. Instead, based on a sense where the ball was being hit, the seven defenders who can move (all but the pitcher and catcher) were arranged accordingly. For decades advanced scouts used multi-colored charts with dotted lines for grounders, straight lines for liners and parabolas for flyballs to try to provide managers an idea where each opponent might hit the ball.
Still, that brought, at best, minor shadings rather than overt shifts. Now, with the benefit of an expanding database, we are seeing this philosophy on steroids. Going into the weekend, there were 2,259 shifts on balls in play compared to 980 last year at the same point (Baseball Info Solutions). Shifts are individualized not just for each batter, but to move within an at-bat based on counts.
Yankees assistant GM Billy Eppler said the idea of just having an infield or outfield coach now has become passé, and that something more akin to an NFL defensive coordinator is necessary. The Yanks have used the second-most shifts in the majors in 2014, and third base coach Rob Thomson, who spends hours daily devising the strategies, says the evolving nature of the shifts will continue.
The reality is that not as many hits are taken away as it seems to the naked eye, but any advantage that can be culled will be, as teams look for the 1- or 2-percent edge. So, for example, when individual hitters have an abundance of at-bats against someone like CC Sabathia and the computerized spray charts show narrower ranges where the balls are hit, the defenders will move to those more specific spots. The understanding is that you cannot cover everything, but you try to cover the areas where the ball is most likely to be hit with frequency.
As more hitters consider bunts, we are seeing the lone defender on one side of the field — what several teams term the "spy" — move from, say, a standard defensive range to an infield-in level as a way to discourage the bunt.
The cat-and-mouse also includes the psychological: Are defenses in the heads of hitters who are considering abandoning their strengths to counter the shift? Can a team rattle a pitcher by bunting a few times for a hit to the point when the pitcher demands a change of defensive alignment? Executives from many teams say the toughest converts to the shift are pitchers who see weak-hit balls go for hits and forget the extra outs created by the shift "no matter how many reams of data we give them to show it," an NL GM said.
We definitely are going to see more refinements. Elliott Kalb, the head of research at MLB Network suggested, for example, that when the Mets start flyball/strikeout specialist Zack Wheeler, they should not play weak-hitting Ruben Tejada and instead should use all four of their outfielders (Curtis Ganderson, Chris Young, Juan Lagares and Eric Young Jr.) to upgrade the lineup with Young Jr. (who has infield experience) moving around batter to batter into new positions.
This is a brave new world, and we will give the final word to lead advocate Luhnow: "We will watch carefully to see how players react, and if they are 'beating the shift' we will adjust, as pass defenses would in the NFL."
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