Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1583: The Shift in Conversation

Episode Date: August 28, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley reflect on the recent protests, statements, and strikes across the sports world and in MLB specifically, touching on why some teams did or didn’t opt to play on Wednesday and Thursday, the messages that those decisions sent, and whether this week will mark a lasting break from MLB players’ past […]

Solidarity, we stand in solidarity We're weary but we're ready Pushing boulders up the hill Let them have the towers The next blue sky is ours We're in this fight to win And we will Solidarity, we stand in solidarity

We're weary but we're ready Pushing bowlers up the hill And we will Hello and welcome to episode 1583 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs, and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Hello, not too terrible. That's good. You're not terrible because you don't work for the Mets. Yeah, that's part of the reason. Ben, the Mets sure did Mets today. So I've heard.

Yeah, I think we should start by saying the way that the Mets Mets was unfortunate because, you know, the bickering between GMs and ownership, it should not detract from like the more important things that Mets players are saying and doing to try to bring attention to the way that the team is responding to protests all across the country so um on the one hand i always love a good met saying but on the other hand the specific nature of this met saying is a pretty big bummer so ben you've been writing all day would you like me to catch you up on on these mets yes please and and on the league and the sports world as a whole if that's not too tall an order. I mean, not for me, but for anyone who maybe has not paid the closest attention. I don't know how you could have not really, but what went down in the sports world on Wednesday and then continued into Thursday across leagues and sports, but also specifically in baseball. It's been quite a momentous couple

of days. It sure has been. So yeah, I don't know how anyone could have missed this. I will do my best to summarize it succinctly so that we can talk about the baseball specific parts of it. But yesterday, the Milwaukee Bucks opted not to play what would have been game five of their series against the Orlando Magic, postseason series against the Orlando Magic, in what was originally and inaccurately called a boycott, but was in reality a wildcat strike. And that decision, which was made because the players of the Bucs organization felt that to play playoff basketball in the wake of yet another officer

involved shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which is not far from Milwaukee, would be a distraction in a moment when we ought not to be distracted. And so opted not to play their game. And subsequent to that, a great many games were called off, often at the behest of players who wanted to stand in solidarity with the Bucs and with the black community to deny people a reason to not pay attention to an issue that's much more pressing. its incompleteness was also a bit disappointing, Major League Baseball got in on the action in a way that I think certainly surprised me, first with the Brewers and then with a number of other teams. So the Mariners and Padres decided not to play yesterday. The Mariners unanimously voted not to play and the Padres went along with that. The Dodgers and the Giants didn't play. play and the Padres went along with that. The Dodgers and the Giants didn't play. As I mentioned, the Reds and Brewers did not play. I will say that all of those games were subsequently made up as doubleheaders today, so they are technically postponements. A number of other teams were sort

of in play as the action was unfolding in Florida in the NBA bubble, but a number of them had time in the evening to decide not to play, and we can kind of talk about their decision to take the field. And then today, a great number of teams elected not to play, some of which kind of came out proactively, some of which came out in drips and drabs. But gosh, we can kind of go around the horn. So the Rockies and D-backs decided not to play. The Red Sox and Blue Jays, although based on what I saw of the weather in Buffalo, I think that they would have faced a weather postponement, but that was not the stated reason that they elected not to play. The Phillies and Nationals,

A's and Rangers, Orioles and Rays, Tigers and Twins, and then the Mets. Yes, the Mets. The Mets and the Marlins. So earlier this afternoon, there was video leaked as the decision about whether or not to play this game was sort of being hashed out amongst the players. Video leaked of Mets GM Brody Van Wagenen talking to reporters. We still have not gotten the exact

TikTok of how this video made its way to the world. But I will read from a transcript that Jeff Passan provided, which is, this is Brody. Baseball is trying to come up with a solution to say, you know, it would be really powerful. Three of us here can't leave this room. You know, it would be really great if you just have them all take the field then they leave the field and then they come back and play at 8 10 and i was like what unidentified voice who said that van wagenen rob and with jeff scheduling is going to be a nightmare and there's so much at stake and i said jeff that's not happening unidentified voice they're not dealing with reality. Van Wagenen, they're not playing. But that's Rob's instinct. And Rob, exactly what you and I were talking about, at a leadership level, he doesn't get it. He just doesn't get it. Anyway, we're waiting.

Jeff wants to hear as soon as we hear from the Marlins. Whatever we do, we need to coordinate with the Marlins. So as soon as Conforto hears from Rojas, Miguel Rojas, let me know because Jeff is standing by for a call. This is not the point of this, but man, Miguel Rojas has really had a lot of influence over the major league schedule this year. That's true. That's an unimportant but sort of wild detail in all of this. So that leaks. And I think people should listen to the video, even though we're about to say some things

that have transpired subsequent to that, because, you you know brody is fidgety and clearly agitated and frustrated and he sounds pretty clear about who he's frustrated with and this video broke on twitter and a great many people said well rob manfred's gonna have to resign because this is just this is unconscionable this is so tone deaf and insensitive to this moment that is very important and certainly much more important than a weird season played in the midst of a pandemic. And we should not be encouraging players to invoke a false or performative sense of activism when they clearly are keen to have very real and frank conversations around an important issue.

And this, he's got to resign. I think a lot of other people were like, have we met Rob Manfred? Right, yeah. Historically speaking, calls for Rob Manfred to resign have not achieved that goal thus far, although there have been many of them. No, they have not. And so subsequent to that, Brody released a statement, Van Wagenen released a statement basically asserting that he had misunderstood who was really responsible for

this, that it was in fact Jeff Wilpon who had expressed this desire to reschedule things, and he was very, very sorry. And then the Mets decided to get in on the action because they can't help but Mets. And so both Fred Wilpon and Jeff Wilpon released statements. Both of them managed to misspell their own GM's name. Yeah. In fairness, a lot of letters in that name. I think the part of this that is the most surprising, and I say this as a Megan who sometimes is the recipient of an errant H, You know, Fred Wilpon's statement, which starts, I am very stressed and disappointed, which is the only time I've ever related to Fred Wilpon on any sort of real level.

He says, I'm stressed and disappointed to learn tonight that our general manager, Brody Van Wagenen, spelled correctly, Brody, B-R-O-D-I-E. And maybe you say to yourself, Brody's a silly name. Why does anyone name Brody? I'm sorry to all the Brodies, your-R-O-D-I-E. And maybe you say to yourself, Brody's a silly name. Why does anyone name Brody? I'm sorry to all the Brodies, your name is fine. But that's how he spells it, and you hired him and signed his paychecks. And then later in the statement, he says, I hold Rob in the highest regard, and in no way are Brody's B-R-O-D-Y. Remarks reflective of my views or the organization's.

Rob continues to be a great leader of Major League Baseball, blah, blah, blah. And then Jeff Wilpon, to clear up any understandings, it was my suggestion to potentially look into playing the game later because of scheduling issues. Brody's, again, B-R-O-D-Y. This understanding of a private conversation wasn't as inexcusable. We fully respect our players, blah, blah, blah, blah. So they met pretty bad. We're going to take, like we said, our little blah blah blah so they met pretty bad we're going to

take like we said our little minute to enjoy their met saying but i think that whatever misunderstandings they think they have around a private conversation the very public conversations that teams across the league are having both black players and other players of color and their white teammates are far more important than this so we'll spend little moment, but then when everyone's done listening to this episode, I'd encourage them to go read those players' comments, coaches' comments. There's been some terrific writing on this subject at a number of different outlets.

So that's far more important, but the Mets remain themselves. Yeah, and as many people have pointed out, one of the best messengers on this issue has been a Met, right? Dominic Smith had a very powerful statement about the effect that the police shooting of Jacob Blake had on him and why the players have reacted as they have. And so it's a shame for that to be overshadowed in any way by typical Mets ownership, buffoonery or miscommunication or ineptitude or some

combination of all of the above. You can all come to your own conclusions about whether there really was a misunderstanding here or whether this was something Rob Manfred was advocating and the subsequent statements were just an attempt to do damage control. But the Mets players and the Marlins players handled the situation well. They took the field. They had a 42-second moment of silence. And then they walked off, leaving only a Black Lives Matter shirt behind covering home plate, which was a pretty powerful moment. I think there are aspects of it that are disappointing. There are aspects of it that are encouraging that would be almost unthinkable that Major League Baseball players and teams would be postponing games because of police violence, because of systemic racism. With a league like MLB, it's one thing if it's the WNBA or even the NBA or MLS or leagues with histories of players being outspoken and being activists. The tradition that goes along with baseball, the way that players are discouraged from speaking out, the way that black players are a minority in clubhouses more so by the year. All of those reasons, which we have discussed plenty, would make you think that baseball would sort of sit this one out. And it did not entirely, except for literally sitting it out in some teams' cases in order to make a statement of support and solidarity

and so as not to provide a distraction. So you could say, well, the fact that it wasn't unanimous is a bad look for baseball, right? Jack Flaherty, who is one of the two Cardinals who didn't play on Wednesday, along with Dexter Fowler, tweeted, why is it so hard to do something unified for one day, just one day? By contrast, the NBA said that they weren't going to play for a few days. Granted, they're in a bubble. They're all in the same place. They can coordinate this much more easily. There are fewer teams that are actually scheduled to play. So it's a little bit different. You know, I think when all of this really came to a head on Wednesday and a few baseball games were postponed and others were not, you know, there were some that were in progress or were about to start, or maybe the players just thought, oh, this is going to be a Milwaukee thing. It's not something that we're expected to get in on, or it just wasn't really on their radar.

And I think there were some teams that said, you know, we didn't really have a chance to talk about this or meet about it. And if we had, we might have made a different decision. And so I'm hesitant to completely condemn any team that decided to play even on Thursday and say, well, they don't care about these issues or they're showing their disregard for it. You do have different groups of players and different messages. And I think in some cases, white players, for better or worse, are trying to sort of follow the lead of their black teammates.

And if they're hearing something different, you know, you had some teams where a black player decided to sit out and the rest of the team said, well, then we're also sitting out because we want to show our support for our teammate and our friend here. And then there are other teams that didn't do that. And, you know, maybe Jason Hayward reportedly said, play, you know, I'm sitting out, but you guys can go play. And did he say that because he really felt that way? Or did he say it because it would have been difficult for him to say something else in that moment, in that situation? Who knows? It's really hard to say. But I think just attitudes about all of this are changing so rapidly across the country, and fortunately and belatedly. And baseball clubhouses are not exactly a bastion of progressive thought.

So I guess I don't want to be totally demoralized or say that if you didn't decide to postpone, that means that you are irredeemable. Maybe different people can want the same thing but come to different conclusions about their part in that or how to show their support or what difference they're deciding to postpone would make. But it is kind of a confusing message when you do have some teams reportedly unanimously deciding not to play, and then others are just going about their business. Yeah, I think that, I mean, I think that that's fair. And perhaps the more productive way to talk about this is to cite an example of a case

where it seems like things have resulted in solidarity, not only within the clubhouse, but with other organizations. I mean, I was really struck by the Dodgers approach. And there are a couple of things about the way that that organization handled it and the people involved that might be instructive for things that both work really well and that we have to look out for from a power dynamic perspective. You know, Mookie Betts reportedly, he said that he had informed his team that he was not going to play and the Dodgers decided to stand with him and to not take the field.

And Dave Roberts said that he wasn't going to manage regardless of whether or not the team was going to play. And I think that, you know, for I don't know clearly what it feels going to play a baseball game. Now, I also have never been a player in a major league clubhouse. So that's another experience that I don't share. But I think that, you know, in this moment to be able to focus on those parts, not only the policy prescriptions that come with them and the hope for change that comes with them, but an understanding of the toll that this takes on people trying to live their lives every day with the weight of this on them, I think is sort of a prioritization that I hope we all think about. I think it's probably instructive that a

player, I don't mean to say that the Dodgers would not have deferred to a player who is less important to their team than Betts is to his, but it probably doesn't hurt that he is one of the best players in baseball. He is one of the best players on a Dodgers team that's stacked and is going to be a vital part of their organization for a long time. So I don't say that to diminish what their approach would have been had it been someone else on that roster. But I think that it probably helps us to understand just how important the solidarity and buy-in is in instances where you might have someone who's on the bubble, right? Who's on the fringe of the roster and is unsure sort of what their position in the clubhouse is going to be.

So, you know, I was disappointed that there wasn't more uniform action. I have been encouraged by the subsequent conversations that teams seem to be having both publicly and within their own clubhouses and locker rooms. So I think that some of the conversations that they're having are really important. You know, Ron Reineke said tonight when he was addressing Boston media that he hopes that when a kid turns on the TV tonight and asks his parents why the Red Sox aren't playing, I hope they have serious discussions with them about why we aren't playing. And so I think that it is not as if a lack of uniform action on that day means that this can't continue to be a very powerful

moment in sports. But I hope that everybody just kind of thinks about how it felt to take the field when they knew that they had teammates hurting and teammates deciding that they needed to take a stand to try to bring attention and discourse to an important issue and that that feeling is one that inspires greater solidarity moving forward so yeah i mean it may just be a matter of you know is there that presence in the clubhouse and who is that presence because unfortunately black players are not as common in major league clubhouses now as they have been at times in the past. And so if you are a white player, a non-black player who

maybe is not thinking about these things as much as you could or should, and no one is sort of making an impassioned speech about it in the clubhouse, then maybe it's easier for you to just say, well, yeah, we've got a game scheduled, so we're going to go out there. Or if you do have a black player who decided to sit out and it's a teammate of yours, but maybe didn't want to impose that decision on everyone else or make a speech about it to his teammates, then maybe you get a different result. And I'm not saying that's fair or right. It shouldn't necessarily be on the black players to explain why this moment matters and why the player's response to it matters or convince anyone not to play. The white players should be

questioned on that just as much, and they should be aware enough of what's going on in the world to understand what's happening here. And I think some players have kind of with added time to reflect and think about what the gesture of playing or not playing says, have maybe realized what the subtext or the text is there. The Rockies were one example. They played on Wednesday, even though Matt Kemp did not. And I think Trevor Story said on Thursday that there was regret about that decision, and they then voted not to play on Thursday, so better late than never. So I think that as Joshian wrote, their cause is just, their methods are peaceful, and they deserve our support. And I think we

certainly agree with that and are heartened that there has been this level of support, at least, just given baseball's past, given some of the sort of supporting black lives matter theater as shakia taylor and bradford william davis have pointed out after opening day how quickly some of those sort of league sanctioned signs of support went away or how insubstantial they were this is the players really kind of taking it on themselves to make a really meaningful statement and to do something that there's not a lot of precedent for recently. And the Players Alliance, also an organization of current and former black players, they announced that they're donating their salaries from Thursday and Friday, which just so happens to be Jackie Robinson Day,

day and Friday, which just so happens to be Jackie Robinson day to combat racial inequality and aid black families. So maybe it's that this sport in the past has set my expectations too low, but there are a lot of gestures of support that are more than just gestures that are going on right now. That's obviously pretty important. Yeah, agreed. And then there are the Mets. And then there are the Mets. You can always count on them to fumble, whatever it is. Not that they

were the only team that didn't cover itself in glory from a PR perspective here. The Diamondbacks, for some reason, chose to put out a statement saying, our players were prepared to play today's game against the Colorado Rockies after team meetings regarding plans to voice their support of social justice and equality. The decision was made to wear our black jerseys and make donations to causes that defend that mission. The Rockies then notified us of their decision to not play in the contest. We are confident the execution of our plan would have represented our support of complete and total equity while providing impact and driving awareness of this ongoing organizational priority.

Okay, I'm sure that statement didn't reflect the sentiments of every player on that team. And in fact, Archie Bradley and John Jay had talked to the media about their support for not playing and how the decision not to play was mutual between those two teams. So in that light, the team statement is even more perplexing. But yeah, I mean, you see how quickly some people have changed their thinking. Even Dave Roberts, who said that he would not have been on the field if the Dodgers had proceeded with their game, you know, just a few years ago, he was sort of against taking a knee or he kind of came out against it and said he saw it as a sign of disrespect for

the flag because of his background. And he has since described his evolution in thinking on that. And that's just over a period of a few years. And there are even more rapid shifts in thinking going on, I think, this year. So you can see why maybe the response would be a little bit piecemeal, but at least there was a response. So we will see whether this is sustained or whether baseball continues to follow the leads of other leagues, other sports on these issues. So there's no great way to shift from that to just talking about batted balls and BABIP. to just talking about batted balls and BABIP,

but I guess shift is the operative word there because we are devoting the rest of this episode to a conversation that we had with two analysts who have devoted a lot of thought to the shift and whether it works. So we will be joined after a quick break by Russell Carlton of Baseball Perspectives and Alex Vigderman of Sports Info Solutions. And this is something that I've been thinking about a lot when I've been thinking about baseball,

because Russell contends that the shift doesn't work, or at least the amount that it's being used right now in baseball is counterproductive, that it may actually be hurting teams. Sports Info Solutions has traditionally advocated for more shifts and has provided products advocating more shifts and recommending when teams should shift. And so they've sort of been on opposite sides of this issue, but we'll see if we can bring them together and find some common ground here. So we will be right back with Russell and Alex. They say that I did hurt you But they don't understand

That I was born to wander by the shifting of the sun. Okay, we are gathered here to, I don't want to say get to the bottom of, because that might be a little over-optimistic for a podcast segment, but at least to explore an issue that has confounded and fascinated me over the past few years, but even more recently, the question of how well the shift works and how often teams should be shifting. Should they be shifting more? Are they shifting too much already? And we are joined now by two analysts who have studied the shift extensively and have come to kind of contrasting conclusions, or at least that's my understanding. Although maybe we will see if that's the case during the course of this discussion. I have joked about this being a duel to the death or a debate, but it's just going to be a friendly back and forth, or at least that's what I'm expecting.

But you never know. Podcast podcasts are unscripted. Our first guest is Russell Carlton, who writes for Baseball Prospectus and has been on the show many a time before. Hello, Russell. Welcome back. Hello. There's the old Russell Carlton greeting. And we are also joined by Alex Victorman, who is an R&D analyst for Sports Info Solutions, a company that studies and quantifies the effects of the shift and really just about everything else that happens on a baseball field and works with many team and media clients, including Fangraphs, which publishes SIS's fielding metric, Defensive Run Saved. Hello, Alex. Hi, thank you for having me. Sorry, I don't have

a patented introduction at this point. and give each of you something of an opening statement to sort of summarize your philosophy of the shift and what work you have done on this question and what conclusions you have come to. And I just used a random number generator to decide who would go first, and it turns out that the answer is Russell. So, Russell, the floor is yours. You can explain what your opinion of the shift is. Yeah. So this is one of the things I've just kind of been working on for the last, I don't know, four years,

five years, whatever it is. And it ended up being the title of a book that I wrote. And I swear the book is not 300 pages about the shift, but plug. But the argument that I have come to was it actually just kind of started with what was sort of a cheeky question, which was we talk about BABIP in front of the shift. But how many people walked or struck out or hit home runs or all the stuff that's not in BABIP in front of the shift? And at first it was kind of a, you know, it was a question was like, well, why do we care? I mean, the defense doesn't touch the ball during a walk. was like, well, why do we care? I mean, the defense doesn't touch the ball during a walk. And, you know, I'd seen some quotes and, you know, it was questions of the shift kind of makes pitchers uncomfortable. Well, does it make them uncomfortable in a way that affects their

performance in other ways? So fast forward a couple of years, you know, I tried to do what I could with what was available. And I found that with the available data that there were more called balls in front of the shift even though we didn't have walk data but in 2018 StatCast and MLB Savant and they they put out data that actually had shift data in it and that was just you know takeable for the download so I went and I downloaded it and they actually had the results of plate appearances including walks and strikeouts and things like that. So I started looking at, okay, well, how many walks were in front of the shift? And we need to be careful. We need to control for who's at bat, who's the pitcher. And to think about some of those things, you know, some pitchers just, you know, might give up a lot of walks. And

if the sample is biased toward those guys, then we need to account for that. But even trying to do as many numerical gymnastic as I could, I kept coming back to the same conclusion, which was, gee, there are a lot of extra walks in front of the shift, and a number that was actually larger than the number of hits that the shift seemed to take away. I mean, certainly the shift does what it says on the label. It does reduce BABIP. There's no question about that in my mind. But the problem was that it seemed to be doing,

seemed to be pumping up the number of walks, and you can't throw a guy out if he gets to walk to first base. So last week at BP, I wrote an article where I tried to dive into a why is that? And so I started looking at some heat maps around the strike zone and where pitchers were throwing. And it turns out on left-handed hitters, they were avoiding kind of the outer third of the strike zone. Not completely, but there was a marginal effect. And that's also kind of poke it to left field territory if you want kind of a cheapy

single. And, you know, sure enough, the pitchers were avoiding that. And where the red part was, where they were going more was kind of, you know, low in, top of the zone, but they were kind of at the edges of the zone, which is great if you can live there and you can locate and you can do that sort of thing or you can get a you can get a swinging strike but it it was kind of taking away part of the strike zone and i'm thinking well you know maybe it's just that if you take away a pitcher's ability to throw strikes or mess with his confidence in in the ability to do that even a little bit. I mean, the link to walks is fairly obvious, but you're also putting batters into a more advantageous count more often. You're working 2-1 instead of 1-2, and that can start to erode some of the benefits that you're going to

get. One of the things I've also seen is you get a slight increase in line drives in front of the shift. And you know that line drives are just a terrible outcome if you're a pitcher because they have a BABIP of like 600 something. And so it was an interesting case study in the unintentional effects that come along with something and making sure that you're looking through those. And so I came to the conclusion that given a choice between the shift how it's done now and then just completely abandoning the idea, I would actually choose the latter. Now, we don't have to do that. There's room for nuance. And I tried to write this week about, well, maybe there are places where that walk penalty

isn't as big in certain types of pitchers and certain types of hitters. And so you don't have to completely throw everything out. But at the same time, I think that there's a pretty good case that right now, at least the way the shift is used, it's overused and in ways that aren't entirely obvious from the way that its effectiveness has traditionally been measured. Okay. So if I could sort of concisely sum that up and tell me if I'm summing this up accurately, your position is essentially that the shift does what it's designed to do. It does prevent hits, it lowers BABIP, but that there is this unintended byproduct of it that maybe people, teams, players didn't initially realize that players are wary of throwing strikes, particularly to certain areas of the strike zone where they're more likely to allow, say, a ball poked, pitchers walk more hitters when the shift

is on and you contend that that undoes the good that the shift does, at least at the current levels of usage, that it's sort of a net negative or not a net positive at this point because of that effect that you found. Basically, yeah. Okay. Alex, you can respond to that if you'd like, or you can just lay out your own shift studies and how you've done that analysis on the cost and benefit. Sure. So I'm in a slightly different position, mostly because the research that Russell has done has been mostly stuff that came out of his own head and he's done over the last several years. Whereas I'm sort of, in a sense, representing a company that has a much longer track record of working on this kind of stuff than me personally. So in the most recent article, Russell basically

said something to the effect of that the walk problem, as he describes it, is sort of part and parcel of the shift itself. And to some extent, there's like a semantic thing there where it's like, yes, it's probably more of a byproduct than it is something that's actually part of the shift, right? We're not really necessarily saying that if you shift, there will be more balls. It's just that because pitchers sort of naturally want to tend their, you know, they understand what the shift is trying to do, and they want to try and help it out. They want to do what they can to make the shift work. And the consequence of that is that they actually make it

not work, which is a sort of weird thing to try and wrestle with. And both of us sort of agree that the shift handles balls hit to the infield the way it's designed to. And so if, you know, a shift candidate saw the exact same distribution of pitches with and without the shift, I think we'd both kind of agree that he'd do worse with the shift on, particularly on the balls in play that the shift is designed to defend the balls to the infield. You know, we use the definition of sort of grounders and short line drives, which is roughly like 175 foot line drives plus all ground balls, which we call GSLs essentially. So if the pitcher tries to adjust his tactics to better play into the shift and instead,

you know, ends up costing himself strikes, that's more of a secondary consequence. So it might be something that's more of a secondary consequence. So it might be something that's unavoidable. And to be honest, we don't know the answer to that. But, and so depending on your optimism regarding whether pitchers can control that, both from a physical perspective, having the physical control, but also the mental control to handle their own worries about what happens when they pitch a certain way, they might be able to get past this. But it's probably not fundamental to the shift itself. And Russell sort of acknowledges that a couple minutes ago, that there's something that could be worked with. But in the current

implementation, there's some evidence. And for what it's worth, I've reproduced the findings that Russell had in terms of increased walk rate and that sort of thing. So there's definitely something there. The key things from our perspective are that there's plenty of evidence that the shift does what it's supposed to do on the balls that it's supposed to handle in terms of batting average on grounders and short line drives. So Russell mentioned earlier that he uses a sort of weighting system to figure out what the shift is worth, because obviously guys who get shifted almost exclusively would make up a larger portion of the sample. And guys who get shifted almost not at all would be too small of a sample.

So we use sort of a weighting system. And using that weighted system, we find that the shift cuts batting average on grounders and short line drives by like 10 to 15 points over the last several years. And that's been pretty consistent year over year. And it's a little more effective to lefties, but that's mostly just because if you're going to shift against a right-handed batter, you're going to do it more judiciously. The real effect that you get though, is when you sort of slice down to the better shift decisions. So the first is the distinction between a full shift and a partial shift. So we track both kinds, the full shift being the full sort of quote Ted Williams shift where there's three guys on one side of the infield. And then the partial shift being two guys

being significantly out of position or one guy being way out of position. Usually that's one of the middle infielders being sort of out into the outfield. And so these partial shifts, we've actually put out a bunch of research. We talked about this at Sabre seminar probably four years ago, that partial shifts, even though they seem like a good way to kind of balance the risk of putting a guy on the other side of the infield, they actually aren't as effective. And basically, if you split this batting out on grouters and short line drives by full and partial shifts, partial shifts basically don't do anything. They don't really move the batting average by more than

five points one way or another. Whereas when we isolate full shifts, we get more like a 30 point difference. And then the next layer of that is that the idea of shift candidacy. So basically, who are you shifting against? And Russell sort of mentioned this earlier, that if you pick and choose your situations a little better, you're going to have better results. So if we use just sort of like a rough estimate based on recent batted ball trends for the guy, so if he hit at least three quarters of his ground balls and short line drives to the pull side for a lefty, 80% for a righty, we call them a shift candidate. And so about, I guess in

2015, it was about 80% of shifts were on what we would define as candidates. And now that's more like 65, 70%. Primarily, that's just because shifts have become more and more and more popular. And eventually you're just going to over allocate those shifts to guys you probably shouldn't be. And again, if we sort of isolate the effect of full shifts on shift candidates as this sort of like ideal scenario in terms of effectiveness, the drop in batting average on the grounders and short line drives is up to 50 points. And again, if for all these other categories in terms of partial shifts or shifts on non candidates, the effect kind of disappears. So the key thing that we kind of want to advocate is

essentially judiciousness in the way that you're using the shift. So while it's really tempting to use more nuanced shifting concepts in terms of nudging a guy a few feet, as opposed to throwing a guy on the other side of the field, the effectiveness actually kind of drops off when you do these kind of half measures. And then also just making sure that you're targeting the right guys. Russell, we'll let you respond to all of that, but I was going to ask both of you, and this is maybe a good time to bring this up. We're all, you know, we're here because we're skeptical of orthodoxy. I don't think that we necessarily have to give teams the benefit of the doubt. But sometimes when I'm kind of thinking through whether a particular strategy or defensive deployment is optimal, I'm curious who's using it and how they are. And so I'm curious, Alex, you mentioned sort of these distinctions in the kinds of shifts that you guys track, but for either of you, and Russell, we will not ask you to reveal any Mets specific secrets, so fear not. But I'm curious, sort of,

which teams are most consistently employing the shift and if both the teams that are doing it and the kinds of shifts that they are most prone to use, tell you anything one way or the other about either the efficacy of the strategy as it stands now, or perhaps teams that are trying to tinker to find a better particular deployment of the shift so that it can overcome some of the issues that you have both raised? Yeah. So in terms of the teams using it, it gets kind of interesting just because from year to year, teams can fluctuate kind of wildly. I'm just looking at, so we have a table of essentially shifts by season by team. And for example, the Twins really have been a big mover in terms of shift usage since 2018, where they went from, again, this is, so we track everything on balls and play because we're doing everything from video. So in terms of shifts on balls and play, they went from 900 in 2017 to 1700 in 2018 and to 2400 in 2019. And in a full season in 2020, they would be even higher than that. So these teams that kind of jump when they go from year to year, the Twins are an interesting

example because they were kind of dinosaurs for a long time. And then they sort of upped their use of analytics. And the sort of obvious place to start doing that is in these kinds of things in working on the shift. The team that's currently leading in shifts on balls and play is the Dodgers, which we all think is a pretty good franchise to be sort of modeling your behavior after. And they're well known for their sort of clever use of tools for defensive positioning in terms of lasers and all that kind of stuff. For a while, it was the Rays that were the big team for that kind of thing.

And also the Astros, although the Astros, I think in terms of, I've also, so I interned for the Red Sox for a bit and, and we would occasionally have conversations about teams that kind of went too far on things. And there was at least to some extent, and a perception about the Astros, for example, that they, when they upticked their shifts, they kind of went too far. And that was several years ago that they did that. And they've tempered themselves since then. But certainly the teams that are more likely to jump up from one year to the next are those teams that you kind of think of in terms of sort of advanced ways of thinking and kind of pushing the envelope. Yeah. So let me direct this to you, Russell. I wonder how you think about the fact that shifts

are becoming more and more and more common. They're up almost 40% this season after being up a lot last season, then almost every season since people started shifting. And I don't know what to make of this because on the one hand, I hold you in high esteem as a writer and an analyst. On the other hand, there are a lot of people who work for baseball teams that I also hold in high esteem, and I assume that they have looked into this themselves. And so the fact that teams are shifting more and more, that teams that we tend to label progressive or smart, quote unquote, are sort of leading the charge or have historically led the charge.

Does that make you doubt yourself? Does it make you think that it can just be easy for anyone to sort of fixate on one aspect of the shift and miss the other aspect? Because that's the fascinating thing. You're not saying that it doesn't work on BABIP. And initially, that's all we really thought of was its effect on BABIP. And so you could imagine a scenario where everyone was just focusing on BABIP, BABIP, BABIP. And initially, that's all we really thought of was its effect on BABIP. And so you could imagine a scenario where everyone was just focusing on BABIP, BABIP, BABIP, and they just were so single-minded on that one thing that they missed this effect that at least to this point has

gone hand in hand. But there are so many people working on quantitative issues for baseball teams, so many smart people, that I almost have to think that people have looked into this. And granted, not everyone who works for teams has the power to make decisions and decree this is how often we're going to shift. But that's something that I feel conflicted about because on the one hand, you don't want to do the appeal to authority and say, well, all the teams are doing it, so they must know what they're doing because that was the justification that everyone used for not shifting, right? Because that was how it had always been. We don't shift. We play with this traditional defensive alignment, and that must be the best way to do it. So one or the other

must be wrong, or I guess there are gradations and degrees here. But how do you square your findings, which Alex has confirmed to an extent with the fact that teams just shift more and more every season yeah and they do and i mean this year this year is up way i mean the the if you look at the the jump in it i think i it was a couple of weeks a week and a half ago i was looking and it was literally the majority of balls in play were in front of a shift this year and i mean that's just astounding, even in a strategy that over the decade of the teens had a 20-fold increase from 2010 to 2019. And this year, it's just up. Of course, it's kind of obscured by the fact that it's going to be a short season,

but it's just way up. And to be honest with you, I keep writing these articles hoping that I'll be like, oh, that's why they do it. Oh, I'm such an idiot. And I keep hoping that I'll be sitting there and poking around my spreadsheet and I'll suddenly discover something that should have been – that I should have seen all along. And then I write a little I'm an idiot article and post it. And I keep hoping that that's going to happen just because it would make the gnawing doubt go away, basically. I mean, I have that same fear of, I do feel a little bit like I'm kind of crying out in the wilderness and if no one hears me, then, you know, am I, am I doing something wrong?

And, and it's entirely possible that I am. I mean, I'm a married man. I've been wrong a lot. Just ask my wife, you know, and you know, it's a, it is the sort of thing that I have literally been awake at night going, did I mess up on the shift? Did I get something wrong? And so, I mean, it is something that I just can't square up. And that's just the way it is. And you've been writing these articles for a while and you know people who work for teams, so no one reached out to you to say here's what you're missing this is why we do it no no one has i mean they would probably they would probably say you know don't don't don't say this but you know i mean they would probably do the cloak and dagger thing but i mean the honest truth is that nobody has reached out to me and said hey this is you know there's this missing piece if they did i would just kind of let the matter drop and and not I wouldn't, you know, out them, but I would just let it drop. It's just, but nobody said that to me. So, I mean, hey, y'all know where to find me. If you could just get me some sleep,

I would be very, very happy. I wonder if we can tease, at least from a theoretical perspective, something that is interesting to me, both least from a theoretical perspective, something that is interesting to me, both because of what you said, Alex, about some of this perhaps being a matter of the strategy not being optimally deployed even within itself, right? That there are some partial shifts that should just bite the bullet and go full shift and then, you know, wrestle with your expertise in psychology. I'm curious, and I know you've touched on this in some of your pieces on the question, but what effect do you expect the unwillingness either of fielders to adapt to the strategy because they're worried about letting a ball go through that they otherwise would be there for if they were in a traditional spot,

or pitchers who just really get in their own heads about the lack of a defender or an incomplete defense on one side of the infield like they would expect do you think that that is something that we will be able to ever quantify or explain satisfactorily because i do sometimes wonder how much of this is a good strategy that perhaps because of human limitations because we all hate to feel embarrassed, we're never just going to be able to deploy quite the way we want to, even if we think the theory behind it is sound. Does that question make sense? Yeah. If you raise your voice a little bit at the end, it has a question mark at the end, so then it's a question. Yeah, there you go. Okay. I mean, I make mention of my background is in psychology. I study how humans work. I study decision making. And when I first started writing this sort of stuff, my hypothesis was maybe it's just this is a little weird and I feel uncomfortable pitching in front of this.

really what is it and you just kind of got to you know sit the pitcher down or you got to sit the fielders down or whatever you want to do and be like okay look this this is okay this is this actually works here's the numbers here's the charts here's all that and it and and at first i thought maybe we could just kind of talk our way through this and and and i you know maybe that is the case maybe we could do that but the longer this goes on and, you know, it's just it's something that I mean, it's out there. And the more that it kind of festers and it's just kind of that that walk penalty is always there. The more I think and Alex may mention this, you know, I'm thinking this is more kind of part and parcel of of what the shift is. I mean, it's you know, maybe it's it's entirely logical and pitchers are just thinking with their rational minds and going, huh, there's only one guy over there. Maybe I don't want to throw a pitch that the batter could poke over there. I want it where there's that three guys over there. that area that they do seem to be avoiding is that part of the strike zone, which, you know,

has these knock-on effects. And so the more I study this, the more I think, I don't know that we can just kind of talk our way through this. And I don't know that we can, I mean, that is the unanswered question. And I don't know if we can fully quantify that. I mean, we can observe the behavior, but I don't know. I mean, that kind of gets into, we would need a mind reading machine to do that. And I don't think StatCast has that feature installed yet. Alex, I wanted to ask, because this is something that's been puzzling me for years. Why is it, how is it that the shift can be preventing so many hits on balls in play ostensibly. And SIS publishes reports or provides its clients with reports on this team has saved this many shift runs and that team has saved that many shift runs.

And yet the league BABIP just really hasn't budged for decades now. And it is down a little bit this season, not so much lately. It's kind of been back to normal since an abnormally low start to the season. But basically, we went from no one ever shifting to the shift being quite common over the course of 10 years or so. And BABIP, at least up until this season, has been basically the same as it was in the mid-90s, let's say. So how is it possible for both of those things to be true, that the shift is stealing a lot of hits from hitters and yet BABIP hasn't actually gone down? So I'm probably not going to have a satisfactory answer for you, but the part of it is to some

extent this notion that Russell's talking about of you take away some singles but you give back in other places so you know the slugging percentage on balls in play with the shift on is actually slightly higher particularly and but that's mostly from balls hit to, you know, above the shift essentially. So there is to some extent this sort of alternate set of batted balls that the shift doesn't have any effect on, at least directly, that actually there is some evidence that there are worse outcomes on those balls. So there is a bit of a counterbalancing effect. The other part of it is that we're only talking about a subset of plays. So we're only talking about these grounders and short line drives, which represent obviously a large portion of the bad balls, but not all of them, not even two thirds, three quarters

of them. So you're only talking about a subset of plays. You're talking about, like I mentioned before, there's shifts that are going to be more or less effective depending on who you're facing, depending on where the fielders are, that sort of thing. seasons not that long ago, the fact is that that also adds in plenty of inefficient shifts that are not, you know, they might, they'll work sometimes, but in general, they're not necessarily best practices. And so they're actually going to give some of those hits back. So it's, it's, there's a little bit of sample size type thing and a little bit of just kind of counterbalancing effects, I think. The thing I always think about here is that it's really hard for people to really work in the negative space of what about the ground ball that never happens?

And I mean, yeah, the shift, I mean, if you hit a ground ball to the right side, the shift is your worst enemy and it does exactly what it does. But when I talked about more called balls, well, okay, well, that means if you're, you know, you're up 2-1, maybe you feel a little bit better about, you know what, I'm going to hunt for a particular pitch and if I get it, I'm just going to sit back and rip on it. And sometimes you get that pitch

and instead of the ground ball to the right side that you would have hit, you actually, you know, square up a nice line drive. And we go, well, okay, you know, the shift wasn't going to do anything about that. But, you know, did that, did that happen as kind of a, you know, a third step downstream of, of the shift and, and, you know, the, the count being in your favor and, and some of those, some of those follow on effects. So, I mean, I, I, I worry about whether what's happening is that, you know, we're taking those ground balls or short line drives to the right side out of circulation and replacing them with things that just have a higher BABIT value or a higher slug value.

So, you know, Russell, you sort of delve through all the public-facing information. Alex, you have all of Sports Info Solutions. I am finally getting out of the habit of calling you guys baseball info solutions. We're still working on it ourselves. But even with all the great data that you have access to now, we don't have the complete suite of StatCast information

that teams have access to. At least, Russell, you don't anymore. I'm curious if there are particular pieces of information, more granular position data that you think would be helpful in helping to sort of unpack the puzzle a bit more between some of the inefficiencies that we see in the deployment of the shift and the persistent use of it by teams that we're all trying to understand and grapple with here.

So I think that one thing that having access to StatCast affords you is the ability to move away from the sort of black and white distinction of shift, no shift. You know, we've tracked this for a decade now, and we've sort of made it a big deal to track shifts. And we have a very rigid definition of that, especially for three men on one side of the field. And we do have a relatively, you know, sort of quantifiable definition for the partial shifts as well, because we want to make sure that those are recorded as consistently as possible. So we have these sort of binary shift, no shift distinctions. But in reality, that's not how you should be positioning

your players. You should be using more granular pieces of information to make decisions about where you're going to position your players. And obviously, you're not necessarily going to say, this guy needs to stand in this exact spot. But in terms of rough areas in which players need to position themselves, the decisions need to be more involved than just saying, oh, I'm going to throw a third guy over the, to the other side of the infield and call it a day. Having StatCast positional data affords you the ability to work on things like optimal fielder positioning,

you know, using some kind of model to essentially optimize where you should position your fielders with some, you know, initial constraints that, because I know that we saw, I think it was Sabre seminar a year or two ago, somebody did optimal field or positioning and produced, you know, against Mike Trout, you end up with like two left fielders and, and guys who are sort of like stacked on top of each other and that sort of thing. So you have to, you can't take these things so at face value, but absolutely like that kind of data affords you the ability to do a much more nuanced version of shift decision-making. So Russell, I know you can't really get into in detail your time with the Mets. I think I can say it was publicly reported that you had to maybe

a little input into their shifting strategies during your time there and maybe advise them on some of the things that you have since written about publicly. But if you were with a team in a decision-making capacity, because a consultant is not always in that position, if you were, what would you do? Would you just say, okay, that's it, shift over, except for maybe some limited times when it does make sense despite the walk penalty? Or would you persist and hope that you could school your pitchers out of the walk penalty,

that you could tell them that this exists, tell them don't pitch differently when the shift is on, because even though it seems like it makes sense it's actually hurting you do you think you could convince them of that or is it not even worth trying oh man if i had that much power goodness um i i would use it for such other things i'm just gonna say don't waste it on shifts i i mean come on i the number of the number of things that i got blamed for that the mets did that I had absolutely nothing to do with. I mean, the things that – I worry a little bit about saying, hey, just go back and throw in the outer third and you'll be fine because – i took a look in one of the articles where i said okay what do batters do differently and sure enough they you know they poke at that pitch

and they they do so more than than in front of a standard 2-2 defense and it's it's fairly obvious why they do that because you know if you're if you're up there and you're like you know i'll take a single here and you can you, you have a pretty good chance of doing that if you've, you know, you play your cards right. And so they're more incentivized to do it. It makes perfectly rational sense. And so they do it. And so it might not be a matter of, hey, we can just, we can just kind of talk you through your nervousness here and do it. I mean, if I, you know, to go back on the inside, I would say, you know, look, here's what I've found. And people that work for teams are also, you know, other human beings.

I know we have this idea that they're some sort of superhumans, but, you know, they are just other human beings. And I don't know, maybe one of them would have, you know, that magical thing that will help me sleep at night. But I would just say, you know, look here, there's something going on here. And maybe this is the sort of thing where, you know, we need to sit down and have these kind of deep conversations with, you know, some stakeholders here, the pitchers themselves, the pitching coach, the, you know, whoever needs to be in on that conversation and say, okay, what, you know, I can't read your thoughts, but, you know, just, you know, talk to me about what's going on in your head as you're preparing for the shift. You know, is it something that you have, you know, some idea of how you're pitching differently or if you're doing anything differently or does it just not register? And I think that that would be, you know, that would be the place to go with that is that, you know, I mentioned not being able to thought read.

be the place to go with that is that, you know, I mentioned not being able to thought read, but, you know, if you have that kind of inside access, it might be worth it to just, you know, sit down and, you know, have people just tell you their thoughts out loud. It would be really great if there was a shift center of the brain where you could put like an EKG on a guy and just see like, oh yeah, you know, he's throwing and this little blip happens. Oh no, he's worried about the shift. Yeah, I'm game for that. If MLB is okay with that, I'm totally fine with that, yeah. So what most people think about the shift,

and I think even in the course of our conversation here, they typically mean shifts that involve infielders on or pretty much near the infield. And granted, there are a number of different kinds of out conversation here, they typically mean shifts that involve infielders on or pretty much near the infield. And granted, there are a number of different kinds of outfield shifts. So that's probably going to determine the sort of course of this question. But we've talked about the infield shift. Have you seen any evidence that makes you think, well, they got this infield thing wrong, but the way they're moving around those outfielders, they have something figured out there? Is there hope for the shift? We just have to go further from home plate? What do you mean in terms of, are you talking about in terms of just outfielder positioning?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's- I think some of the StatCast stuff, they technically define as shifted, right? When they move beyond the standard, relatively standard deployment. And there's probably something to that. I mean, we know that even on the infield, you know, you can do optimal positioning, and it might be, it's a little bit more obvious in the outfield, because if you think about, you know, if you want to move a couple of degrees to the right or the left on the infield, that's, you know, maybe a step or two. You know, if you're in the outfield, it's a good number of feet and you can actually see the player doing it. And so, I mean, that's, I think that it's easier to pin down in the outfield.

okay, well, you know, is there a specific range of angles, of spray angles that we see here? And if the answer is, yeah, well, okay, we'll put a fielder there. I mean, that's, I think that that's, that is very much in play. And I think that I'm sure all of the teams are doing it at this point to try and get that. And I think that, you know, some of that, some of that small gradation of, you know, just a jump to the left and a step to the right is, is all stuff that you can, it's all stuff that you can do and, and should be done. I think that when you're pulling a fielder over to the other side of second base, it's just such a drastic, it just changes the rules so much in terms of what the incentives are that I think that you're then dealing with a very new set of variables that just don't change as much if you're just kind of doing little nudges here and there. has shifted, sorry, on this subject over the past decade or so, where when teams started shifting

initially, it was still sort of this us versus them, sabermetrics versus old school kind of battle, you know, and there was a lot of resistance within the game. And it seemed so intuitive that, well, of course, if you put your fielders where the batter tends to hit the ball, then that's going to be more effective than just leaving them in the same position for every batter, regardless of their batted ball patterns. And that seemed so obvious, and yet there was this inertia and this reluctance to do that. And there were a lot of objections about, well, pitchers are uncomfortable with it, players are uncomfortable with it. And maybe some of that was true. Again, maybe that's not the whole effect. And it certainly is the case true. Again, maybe that's not the whole effect.

And it certainly is the case that putting fielders in front of where the ball goes still seems like a good idea if you want to prevent hits. But the idea that maybe we were missing this big glaring thing all along, that we were also convinced that we were smart, that we had figured this thing out, that the tradition was wrong, and that really we were fixating on this one aspect of the shift and totally missing this other thing that was kind of counteracting the effect that we found. That is sort of a seductive idea. One could write a book about that and call it The Shift and actually have it be all about The Shift this time. Call it something else. Russell already has that title. But there are a lot of examples of that, right? Where sabermetricians analysts were kind of overconfident at first and maybe reached the wrong conclusion or didn't have the right data

to reach the right conclusion, whether it's catcher framing or something else, right? Before we had PitchFX, smart people like Keith Woolner looked into catcher framing and said, no, it doesn't seem to exist. There doesn't seem to be anything to it. And then, of course, now we realize that it matters a whole lot. And there are other examples of that, too, where it turns out that at first we were a little bit wrong about something in kind of an interesting way. And maybe the old school people were right in their way, too. And so I don't know that that is the case with the shift. And I don't want to let that nice narrative that is so stimulating to me govern what I think about this. And of course it works. And how could you possibly claim that it doesn't? And maybe we were missing something all along, but that sort of still remains to be seen. So

that's kind of why I keep coming back to it. It's like an example of the fallacies that smart people can get into, or it could potentially be an example of that if that is borne out by the results. But I guess further study is required and further instruction and ways to try to teach players to find a way around this. But I just wonder what people with teams are thinking. I know there are people on teams and in front offices that listen to this podcast, and presumably they have all either independently reached the conclusion that this makes sense, or maybe they reached that conclusion five years ago and haven't really re-examined it, and it's just become the new dogma, the new orthodoxy, or maybe they do have better data or a better way of looking at it, or maybe after overcoming all of that resistance and teaching your players and coaches that this is the way to do things, it's kind of embarrassing to go back to them and say, actually, we missed this big honking thing that actually it turns out that maybe you guys were sort of right about this at first.

So I don't know if we're at that point, but that is why this is all so compelling to me. And Alex, I mean, you work with teams, right? You have team clients, and I don't know if you can get into that, but has this come up at all? I mean, I know that teams probably look at the recommendations for, say, the optimal shifting rates that SAS has published in the past or the present. So have you said anything to them about this, or have they said anything to them about this or have they said anything to you about it? Or has this, to your knowledge, not really gone beyond the baseball prospectus comment section? I would say I don't remember hearing anything in terms of people being

circumspect about shift effectiveness and that sort of thing. We've had a product that offers the sort of shift, no shift decision recommendation. We've had that for years now. So it's something that we've offered, that we've talked to teams about. We've talked about it for years, obviously, because we've been kind of the pioneers in terms of tracking the shift.

We end up having lots of conversation about the kinds of things that we offer with respect to that. And generally, it is one of the products that teams are interested in. And it's one of the things that they're looking for insights through. But I don't know that I've heard that much in terms of people being sort of questioning whether the shift is effective, at least not to us. Now, of course, it's a little awkward to potentially have that conversation when we're trying to sell the thing that tells them to do it. So maybe they're disinclined to sort of start the conversation, but I don't remember hearing anything at least.

And the other way, I guess, my thinking about this has changed is that initially it was this exciting innovation and an example of ingenuity and bold thinking. And now just the standard infield overshift is kind of old hat. I mean, it's almost the default now. And so it's a little less exciting. And so we're all drawn to the new thing and the counterintuitive take and, oh, maybe the shift doesn't work. So that's exciting now and you know i think four man outfields are exciting and five men in fields are exciting and some of the really exotic shifts and alignments that we see these days but the old boring shift that was so new and transgressive a decade ago is now something that we're all accustomed to seeing. And also, I think the effect of the shift, if it does work really well, is less offense, fewer base runners, lower batting average, and if you think of this and you're bold enough

to implement it, then you should be rewarded, then suddenly it's like, well, if this works, then it might actually make baseball less entertaining, which is sort of what some people have been saying all along. You know, when Rob Manfred would float every now and then, we should ban the shift. I think a lot of us said, well, no, you shouldn't, A, because we should give hitters an opportunity to react to that and see if they can find a you shouldn't, A, because we should give hitters an opportunity to react to that and see if they can find a way around it. And also because it doesn't actually seem to be working all that well, or it's not really responsible for increasing strikeout rates

or reduced batting averages. And maybe that still turns out to be the case. But after all this time, it seems like batters are unwilling or probably unable or some combination of both to really beat this thing, to start laying down bunts or regularly going the other way. Because it turns out it's really hard to direct where you put your batted balls when you're just hard pressed to make contact at all. So I don't really know which I'm rooting for here. I guess my loyalties are a little different from what they were in 2010. Yeah. And I mean, I worry that short of, I mean, banning the shift, which they did in the Atlantic League, if I'm not mistaken, and they put like the third foul

line out there outside of second base, there's the reality that if a team has the opportunity to clamp down on runs, they are going to do it. It may not look pretty on TV, but they are going to do it. And I worry that, yeah, I mean, that one of the things that I've seen in my stuff on the shift over and over again is that it actually discourages balls in play. And, you know, we talk. And we talk about pace of play and whether there's kind of enough action in the game and walks and strikeouts are boring

and nobody wants to watch them. And we're taking away singles but replicating them with walks. Well, if walks are boring, maybe this is something that is bad for the product. So, I mean, there's something to be said for, you know, maybe the happy ending is the shift doesn't really work. People take it off, more singles, fewer walks. Yeah, scoring actually goes down, but there's just, you know, more balls pinging around the

field that people like to see. So, I mean, maybe there's a silver lining to it at the end of the day. There's also sort of an odd incentive structure, especially the difference between the incentives for us as consumers of the product and the players themselves. So Ben, you were talking about, you know, what, how does a hitter react to this? And maybe, you know, maybe they do end up poking a ball to the other side a little bit more often, and that results in more hits for them. And that probably does result in a higher batting average. But at the end of the day, they're going to get paid more if they get more extra base hits. And that's just sort of the way

things work. And it's going to be hard to convince people to move towards a more contact-oriented poking the ball to the other side approach when the financial incentives for the players are such that they really do want to just hit for power when they can. And so these in-game incentives of more strikeouts, more home runs, and all that kind of stuff, that drives the team decision-making because at the end of the day, they do want to win. But obviously, as a fan perspective and people who are concerned about sort of the health of the game overall, that kind of goes at the opposite direction of those things because it reduces balls in play. It potentially makes longer games, all these other sorts of things. I have a question that might be very

stupid. And you can tell me, you can be like, Meg, you're just way off the mark on that one. And then we'll move on and I won't hold any grudges. And that'll be that. But I wonder if perhaps one thing that teams might be thinking about when it comes to justifying the shift to themselves is looking at players from their total contributions. And I think we are familiar with guys playing second base in particular, both in the majors now and, you know, there's sort of a crop of prospects who might otherwise have been thought to not be able to play middle infield spots that are now kind of being allowed to hang around there as a way to get their out in the field, in part because they are shift aided. So is there a possibility that part of the way that teams are maybe thinking about this is, yeah, that guy, you know, in total, the shift isn't doing quite as much as we want it to, but it's allowing us to play player X at second, and we want that bat in the lineup. So we're able to justify it to

ourselves in that respect you can tell me that's terrifically uh terrific yes terrific absolutely that that is terrific it's terrifically no that is i'm like oh that's a great idea i gotta write about that no i mean that that it's entirely possible that that's that is something that's going on that you know there's there's only so much there's only so much you can do to hide a glove, a bad glove. Right. iffy glove, you know, negative 10 second baseman who are out there and the teams are like, well, you know, but we could throw him into the lineup and it would, you know, be worth X number of runs. I don't know that there's enough of that to really move the needle a whole lot,

but I think that there's something to be said for that. There's, you know, if you can get away from, There's something to be said for that. There's, you know, if you can get away from, we don't need our second baseman to be that good on defense and we can play a little bit more toward either moving a guy there or, you know, trying to sign a free agent who isn't as gifted there and try to cover for it that way. I mean, I think that that's, there is some incentive in there, and there's something – it's not a stupid theory. I mean, it's actually a pretty good one. I like it. Russell, I'm so relieved. Oh, good. Well, we have orchestrated this meeting of the minds, and before we part the minds, is there anything that either of you would like to say to the other?

Any questions or comments or suggestions now that you're on the same podcast? I guess so. It is sort of funny just to be on here because especially a couple of years ago when Russell put out a couple articles, it was probably like three over the course of the summer, he became sort of like our nemesis in the office. And so there's definitely a bit of like a Russell Carlton, whenever there's an article that comes out. So it is sort of funny to be in a context that is theoretically could be a debate, but in reality, like we agree on enough things. And for what it's worth, I was a psychology major in college. So we're both sort of coming at things from a similar angle often. So there's more common ground than I think it seems like. And frankly, just a lot of it is that we think that the thing works in a

specific way and people react to it in a rational way, like the evidence that Russell showed in his most recent articles, that it kind of looks like the pitchers are doing what they really should be doing if they were able to execute it perfectly, right? Like if you were able to have enough control that you could throw that ball on the outside edge of the plate and not get the extra balls, then you would get kind of the ideal result. And so part of it is just sort of human fallibility. And maybe that's the piece that the teams are missing where they're adding more and more shifts. But at the end of the day, the players can only execute things so finely. And so you're going to lose some of the theoretical value of it,

because they just can't execute it as well as you want them to. I'm so sorry I caused such drama. Trauma is hard to work for. I'm sorry. No, I mean, just kind of leading up to this, I mean, you guys are working with the SIS dataset and I don't have access to that. And I'm, I, I was actually worried. I'm like, come on and be like, you're like, Oh no, our, our data set says something totally different. You're totally wrong. And, you know, and as,

as you were kind of doing your opening thing, I'm like, Oh, okay. So yeah, they're finding that too. Okay, good. They're finding that too. Okay, good. I feel so much better. And so, I mean, it's, it's really cool. I mean, it's, there, there's this piece that I mentioned earlier that, that we don't know, and it's whether we could really, you know, talk our way out of this and whether we could, you know, you talk about human fallibility and whether we could kind of train pitchers to pitch in a way that is kind of shift proofproof or at least kind of gets rid of the bad parts of the shift enough.

It doesn't have to do the whole thing, but it just has to get it back to profitability. And at that point, you know, if something's a net positive, if it's a minor net positive, well, you do it. And there's that part that we haven't really explored. And I, you know, that's the part where, you know, as much as I, the first line of that one article was let's kill the shift or something like that.

You know, we can't really do that without really having a full accounting for it. But that's, I mean, that's the cool part that, you know, in just this conversation, I'm like, yeah, this is good stuff. Well, yet again, I tried to set up a brutal grudge match instead. I got a respectful and conciliatory discussion. So it just seems to happen no matter what we do. But I thank both of you for coming on and explaining and defending your ideas here and talking to us and each other. It has been entertaining and enlightening for me. And, of course, I will link to

all your stuff that's out there on our show page, and I will link to Russell's research on this subject. Of course, you can find him on Twitter at pizzacutter4. You can find him writing every week at baseballperspectives.com. And you can find his aforementioned book,

The Shift, The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking. You can find Alex on Twitter at, The Shift, The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking. You can find Alex on Twitter at VigManOnCampus. Well done. You can also find the most recent publication of SIS and Act of Sports, The Fielding Bible, Volume 5, which came out this spring. You can find SIS on Twitter at SportsInfo underscore SIS. You can find SIS on Twitter at sportsinfo underscore SIS. And if you need more podcasts in your life, you can find the Sports Info Solutions baseball podcast hosted by our pal Mark Simon. So hopefully I didn't miss any plugs there.

But thanks to both of you for doing this. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks. This was wonderful. Okay, that will do it for today. Thanks, as always, for listening. And please do check out the show page, as always, for many links related to today's topics. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon

by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Adam Mael, Ryan Thibodeau, Melissa Danielson, Sarah Cumby, and Melissa Scroggs. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Please keep

your questions and comments coming for me and Meg and Sam via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance, and you will see another episode appearing in your feed quite soon before the end of this week, so we will talk to you then. All the pain, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, all the tears, Bye.