Agent blames more shifts on Harper’s hitting struggles

When Washington Nationals manager Dave Martinez was Tampa Bay’s bench coach in 2008 or 2009 — he doesn’t remember which year this happened — Evan Longoria, then the Rays’ star third baseman, hit a groundball in the hole between shortstop and third base. Martinez assumed Longoria had a single. There was no doubt. But he didn’t get a hit because the Milwaukee Brewers shortstop was standing exactly in that spot. The Brewers had shifted their infield to the left, leaving Martinez dumbfounded.

The next season, the Rays, managed by Joe Maddon, began implementing shifts in spring training, quickly becoming the most aggressive with the tactics across baseball. A decade later, every team shifts with regularity, some more aggressively than others, and a debate over whether Major League Baseball should implement rules to limit shift freedoms has surfaced.

“It’s taken away a lot of hits, obviously, and guys get frustrated,” Martinez said. “But it’s also leaving a lot of other holes open. I think, for me, players that have learned how to adjust with the shift are doing better as well. Players that keep hitting the ball into the shift. ... I think that’s why the batting average is really low a lot.”

Martinez has perhaps the best example playing for him every day. At least Scott Boras, baseball’s super agent, believes so. Boras has strong opinions on many baseball matters, and during a 25-minute session with reporters Tuesday, he espoused a few about why his client Bryce Harper — slated to perhaps sign the richest contract in American professional sports history this coming winter — is not enjoying a typical Harper season.

Harper is batting .215 after he went 0-for-4 in the Nationals’ 3-0 loss to the Boston Red Sox, but Boras insisted evaluating Harper through batting average is misguided because he has been the victim of unusual circumstances. One is how teams are pitching to him so carefully. The other is how opponents are shifting against him.

While other offensive stats have surfaced and gained popularity in recent years, batting average remains the basic measuring stick. It is the first number looked at, and Harper’s ugly number has drawn attention. But Boras looks at Harper’s hard-hit rate (41.3 percent entering Wednesday, which would be a career best). He looks at his walk rate (18.5 percent, which would be his second highest). And he looks at his batting average on balls in play, BABIP (.225, which would be the lowest of his career by a huge margin). He concludes that Harper, whose batting average has plummeted 53 points since May 3, is not performing as poorly as his batting average indicates.

“I’ve dealt with greatness in this game for a long time, and the great thing about trials in the game, that the game brings to great players, is that you have to look at what the game and the opponents are trying to do and what the game’s trying to do to prohibit greatness,” Boras said. “Because he gets off to a great start, what do they do? Well, they’re going to starve him from the strike zone. And remember they’re not doing this to a [Mike] Trout or a [Manny] Machado. Why is that? They’re great players. Why are they not doing it them, yet they’re doing it to Bryce? And the answer to that, I think, is largely that [the] power component carries a great fear.”