Shifts stall Yankees,
McCann, Teixeira foiled more than any other players
The offensive struggles of the 2016 New York Yankees can be summed up by the fourth inning of their Memorial Day game with the Toronto Blue Jays. Three batters came to the plate, each batting left-handed, and each pulled a ball toward a shifted infield defense. While Carlos Beltran’s liner just evaded displaced shortstop Ryan Goins in shallow right field, he was eliminated on Brian McCann’s subsequent grounding into a 3-6-3 double play. Mark Teixeira ended the inning by hitting one straight to out-of-position Goins in shallow right.
Defensive shifts are being deployed at a rate unseen in major league history, and the Yankees are suffering as a result more than any other ballclub. Fangraphs.com provides data on all balls hit in play versus the shift going back to 2010, and those leaderboards are grim reading for Yankees fans.
Among players who have 300 balls in play versus the shift since 2010, the bottom two players in on-base-plus-slugging percentage (OPS) are the Yankees’ McCann (.514) and Teixeira (.523). (Teixeira was recently placed on the disabled list with a knee injury.)
The shift remains a problem for them in 2016: Among the 22 American Leaguers with at least 80 balls in play against the shift this season, McCann and Teixeira ranked fifth- and sixth-worst by OPS. Teams exploit this weakness in the duo’s game by shifting them more than almost any other player. The pair are two of only seven players to have hit into 1,000 shifted defenses.
Even the less commonly shifted players on the Yankees are suffering. Using a plate-appearance threshold of 15 sees three Yankees — Alex Rodriguez, Starlin Castro and Dustin Ackley (out for the season with a shoulder injury) — with a bottom-10 OPS in the AL this season.
The shift is most effective and most frequently deployed against lumbering lefties with predictable pull tendencies. Of those seven players with 1,000 recorded shifts against them, all but one are such batters: David Ortiz, Ryan Howard, Prince Fielder, McCann, Adam Dunn and Adrian Gonzalez are the lefties; with Teixeira instead a sluggish switch-hitter.
While most players have a somewhat below-average OPS on balls hit into a shift, partly because home runs and walks are not counted as balls in play and therefore not recorded in the data, it’s the players shifted most frequently, such as McCann and Teixeira, who suffer the most. The 25 most shifted players have a median OPS of .643 versus the shift, compared to a median OPS of .681 for the next 25 most shifted players.
Unfortunately for the Yankees, they have been fielding a lot of easily shiftable players of late, and the degree to which they have been struggling stands out. Since 2010 the Yankees have put more balls in play against a shift (4,330) than any other team and have had the worst OPS (.576) on those plays. That number is 55 points of OPS poorer than the Cleveland Indians’ next-worst .631 figure and 213 points worse than the San Francisco Giants’ major leaguebest .789 OPS in this split.
To put that figure in perspective, the difference between the Yankees’ and Giants’ OPSs against the shift is roughly equivalent to the difference in the career OPSs of Mike Trout (.956) and Carlos Ruiz (.745). Even the difference between the Yankees and the next worst team against the shift is akin to the gap in the career OPSs of Robinson Cano (.852) and Seth Smith (.797).
The Giants have been the least affected by the shift largely because of their players’ superior ability to hit the ball to the oppo- site field. San Francisco’s rate of going the opposite way when the shift is on is a league-leading 26.8% since 2010, while the Yankees are second worst at 21.7%.
Brandon Belt is the primary shift beater on the Giants. Only 12 players in the National League have put more balls in play against a shift than Belt, but no one in the majors has a better OPS than his .858 figure (minimum 250 plate appearances). Belt has spoken publicly about working on bunting the ball to the open space on the left side of the infield when he is being shifted, but it’s not a strategy he has employed often. He has certainly not admitted to changing his approach with the shift on beyond trying to hit the ball as hard as possible.
Instead it seems that Belt’s approach has changed across all of his plate appearances. After pulling a career high 48.3% of his balls in play in 2014, Belt dropped that figure to 38.4% last year and to 36.0% this season. Correspondingly, his rate of going to opposite field has risen from a career low of 21.2% in 2014 to 25.8% in 2015 and 34.7% this season.
Belt has gone from pulling the ball almost half of the time to spraying the ball to right and left field with almost equal frequency, yet teams are shifting him more than ever before. If Belt keeps up his opposite-field hitting, opponents might revise their defensive positioning.
As for the Yankees, something will have to change if they want to overcome their woeful offense in 2016. They’ll either need to take a leaf out of Belt’s book and hit the ball to the opposite field more or live up to their Bronx Bombers nickname and hit it where the fielders can’t get it: over the shift and into the seats.