You have probably noticed that defensive shifts have become a significant part of today's game. For five straight years MLB teams have set the record for most shifts in a season, and they are on pace to do so again in 2017. Several teams now shift over 1,000 times in a season, whereas six years ago only a handful of clubs even reached triple digits.
With the marked increase in shifts, it makes sense that hitters and coaches would do their best to come up with ways to try to beat them. After all, the shift initially gained recognition as a way to counter the extreme pull-hitting tendencies of lefty sluggers. It works well in that regard. On ground balls and short line drives that featured three players on one side of the infield, batters hit just .240 in 2016, compared to .271 against normal defensive alignments.
On some level, baseball is a cat-and-mouse game -- teams and players try to take advantage of what the other side is giving them. When batters consistently hit the ball to one side of the field, the defense repositions to increase the chances that the ball is hit to a fielder. It's up to the hitter to decide whether he wants to use his same pull-heavy approach or change it to something that could afford him more success.
There are several approaches batters use to try to beat the shift, some more successfully than others. For example, because the shift leaves parts of the infield open, some hitters have opted to try hitting the ball to those spots. And while we typically focus on ground balls and short line drives when evaluating the effectiveness of the shift at Baseball Info Solutions, players aren't necessarily going to aim to hit the ball exclusively on the ground to those open spots. So even though shifts are most effective against grounders and short liners, we looked at all balls in play to determine the success hitters are having against them.
Bunts: Taking what the defense gives you
It seems obvious: When a team puts three hitters to the right of second base against a lefty hitter, why wouldn't he just bunt down the third-base line for an easy hit? Sounds easy, but there are many good reasons why hitters don't do this more often, including a plain inability to do so. Some refuse to drop down a bunt because it limits any offensive threat they may otherwise provide.
That being said, there are a few players who, when facing a shift, have shown themselves capable of dropping down a bunt. Twelve different players have attempted to bunt for a hit at least four times against the shift since the start of the 2016 season through Thursday night's games, with most seeing at least moderate success.
Rougned Odor leads the way by resorting to eight such bunts, reaching base six times. Danny Espinosa, Colby Rasmus and Marwin Gonzalez aren't far behind, while reaching base on at least 40 percent of the time. In terms of efficiency, none of them compare to Kirk Nieuwenhuis, who has successfully bunted for a hit against the shift every time he tried.
On this list, Javier Baez is the only one who didn't reach base at least twice. He's also the only player to hit from the right side -- switch-hitters Espinosa, Gonzalez, and Asdrubal Cabrera made all of their attempts from the left side. Generally, you expect bunt attempts against the shift from lefty hitters when no one is guarding the third-base line. Baez has been thrown out by the catcher on a short bunt, called out for leaving the base path trying to avoid the tag on a bunt up the first-base line, thrown out from third by a bunt to the left side, and he barely beat out a bunt back to the mound. Generally speaking, it isn't working for Baez as a tactic.
The other thing to realize is that these players aren't necessarily the ones shifts are designed to counter. Just three of them -- Rasmus, Joc Pederson and Kyle Seager -- have been shifted against in over 75 percent of their plate appearances, while Espinosa, Gonzalez and Baez don't even crack 40 percent. Despite Baez's two most-shifted teammates this year, Anthony Rizzo and Kyle Schwarber, receiving some attention for laying down bunts against the shift in the same game on April 17, players who see that level of shifting against them haven't shown much willingness to bunt with any frequency.
Hit it where they ain't
While surprising the defense with a bunt can certainly get a hitter on base, it also means giving up the ability to help his team in other ways. Many of the most frequently shifted players hit for power, but laying down a bunt means giving away the threat of a home run.
Some players take other approaches to beating the shift, ones that don't automatically involve sacrificing any extra-base hits. One such approach is to simply hit the ball the other way. With teams shifting their infielders out of position, holes open up for hitters to hit the ball to the opposite field -- if they can.
To see which hitters have changed their approach to try to do this, we looked at players who had at least 50 balls in play (excluding bunts) against both normal defensive alignments and against the shift. This guaranteed a baseline for what the hitter's usual approach is, as well as a large enough sample size to see if any adjustments were made. His batting average on balls in play against the shift (shifted BABIP) was then compared to the league-average shifted BABIP (.296) to see what kind of success this change in approach had.
Chase Utley, Stephen Drew and Adam Jones stand apart as far as hitting the ball the other way, with all of them decreasing their pull rate -- defined here as hitting the ball to the pull side of second base -- by over 14 percentage points. All of them have recorded a BABIP against the shift near or higher than league average, with all but three sustaining a better-than-average BABIP against the shift, likely due to their tendency to hit the ball into the spots vacated by defenders.
The other two outliers here are Justin Morneau and Seth Smith. There's no obvious explanation as to why these two in particular have fared worse than the others, but it does show that this approach isn't guaranteed to work. Their struggles in this regard could have a number of explanations, like random variation, having their swing timing or mechanics thrown off, or generating weaker contact on balls hit the other way.
Don't change what ain't broke
The players just examined were those who adapted to the shift. Whereas they normally pull the ball, they have made the adjustment to go the other way in an attempt to get some easy or easier base hits. These next guys are not like that.
Some players facing the shift decide that they don't care what the defense is showing them. These hitters pull the ball against normal defensive alignments and they pull the ball against the shift; it doesn't make a difference. Maybe for them, changing their swing in an attempt to beat the shift would be more detrimental than the extra outs they will inevitably ground into.
Again, to find these hitters, we looked for those that had at least 50 balls in play, excluding bunts, against each type of defensive alignment. The league-average pull rate is just under 58 percent, so players were only considered if they had pull rates of over 60 percent in each case. There were 39 players who met both of those qualifications.
It makes sense that the differences in pull rates for most of these hitters is negative since they started off with such high pull tendencies against normal defensive alignments. The differences are also much less extreme, since these are all hitters who continue to pull the ball against the shift.
On the list in the previous section, seven of 10 players have managed a higher BABIP against the shift than the league average. Here, that number is just four, as more of these players' balls in play were hit into the shift and recorded for outs. These numbers would likely look worse if only ground balls and short line drives were considered, but this data shows that when including all balls in play, it's not automatically damaging to hitters to stick with their extreme pull-hitting tendencies.
The other six players all saw results that were worse than league average on their balls in play. Gary Sanchez was one of the players who was hurt the most by this approach, so it will be interesting to see when he comes back from injury this season whether or not his approach has changed.
Up, up and away
There are other ways to beat the shift besides trying to hit the ball around the defense or through it. Namely, some players seem to try to hit the ball over the shift.
Intuitively, this is a logical approach. Teams tend to only drastically shift their infielders, while outfielders are generally shaded slightly one way or another. If you hit the ball over the infielders' heads, it doesn't matter whether they're in their normal positioning or if all four are standing on one side of second base.
To evaluate who changed their approach the most this way, each player's difference in ground ball rate was used, while the same minimum qualifications were used to find the players with the greatest difference between their shifted and nonshifted ground ball rates.
You'll notice some repeats in this leaderboard from the one for guys who went opposite-field against the shift. Jones and Utley appear in both, so perhaps those are the players most actively changing their approach to beat the shift. Jones in particular looks like a player for whom the adjustment has worked best, as his BABIP against the shift is dramatically higher than league average.
Just as for the opposite-field group, this approach did not guarantee success for hitters. Kendrys Morales, Addison Russell and Derek Norris are just some of the players who kept the ball off the ground against the shift but still wound up being less than average on their balls in play.
Brian Reiff works for Baseball Info Solutions. You can follow him on Twitter (@BrianSReiff).