Back when I was growing up as an eager young Kansas City Royals fan, shortstops couldn't hit a lick. Royals shortstops certainly couldn't, not even during the franchise's heyday from 1976 to 1985. We loved our shortstops, from Freddie Patek to U.L. Washington to Buddy Biancalana. They were regulars on some of the greatest teams in franchise history. But, collectively, they couldn't hit their way out of a paper bag.
That wasn't too unusual for the era. Generally speaking, shortstops couldn't hit in the 1970s. Here are the wRC+ figures by decade for shortstops, with 100 denoting a league-average hitter:
SHORTSTOP OFFENSE (wRC+ by decade)
1900s: 94
1910s: 87
1920s: 81
1930s: 85
1940s: 85
1950s: 83
1960s: 81
1970s: 73
1980s: 80
1990s: 83
2000s: 87
2010s: 88
Source: Fangraphs.com
Shortstops of all eras have tended to come in well under league average offensively as a group. The reason is obvious: Shortstop has always been the most important defensive position on the field. It's hard to find players who are good hitters and can hold down that spot, and when forced to choose between the bat and the glove, when it comes to shortstops, leather has always been more valuable than wood.
That was never more true than in the 1970s, when managers neglected shortstop offense to a stunning degree. According to baseball-reference.com's split finder, there were 96 shortstops that decade with at least 300 plate appearances at the position. Only two had an OPS of .800 or better (Denis Menke and Rico Petrocelli) and just five others cleared .700. Forty-nine of them -- more than half -- were under .600. Mario Mendoza -- of Mendoza Line fame -- was given 819 plate appearances that decade despite an OPS of .472.
The calculus has changed. In fact, as Ben Clemens of Fangraphs wrote, shortstops have never hit better. Through Wednesday, the 104 wRC+ that shortstops have compiled in 2019 is at an all-time high.
However, over the first few weeks of the 2019 season, we do have a group performing like the 1970s shortstops: center fielders. Through Wednesday, that position was at a wRC+ of 87 -- the lowest ever, by whopping margin.
The degree of this is probably a fluke. Positional numbers have a lot of variation from season to season and can tell a false tale if weighed too heavily. While the top of this year's center-field leaderboard features superstars such as Mike Trout and George Springer, it also shows a lot of players off to really bad starts. A.J. Pollock had a wRC+ of 67 before going on the injured list. Jackie Bradley Jr. is at 15 -- his OPS is at a Mendoza-like .415.
Still, this appears to be a trend.
CENTER FIELD OFFENSE (wRC+ by decade)
1900s: 108
1910s: 111
1920s: 107
1930s: 101
1940s: 105
1950s: 105
1960s: 106
1970s: 103
1980s: 101
1990s: 99
2000s: 97
2010s: 99
Source: Fangraphs.com
For decades, center field was an offensive position, featuring some of our greatest players, from Joe DiMaggio to Willie Mays. For most of the current generation, however, things have tilted toward the glove. That evolution has accelerated during the Statcast era, with wRC+ totals of 96, 101, 96 and this year's 87 since 2015.
There are probably myriad reasons for this, but it's pretty easy to see why defensive work in center field would take on increased importance during a time of reduced balls in play overall, but also with an increase in the ratio of balls hit in the air to those hit on the ground. This makes intuitive sense, but the actual numbers are startling. Forget about fancy defensive metrics like UZR or defensive runs saved. You just have to look at plain old chances.
First, keep in mind that, historically speaking, fielding chances are down all over the diamond except at one spot: catcher. As strikeout totals dwarf those of previous generations, all of those catcher putouts skew overall fielding numbers. But when you look at the rates with catcher data removed, you can see how things have changed.
Consider the ratio of infield chances to outfield chances. Here are those numbers by decade, going back to the 1950s:
RATIO OF INF TO OF CHANCES BY DECADE
1950s: 3.42
1960s: 3.67
1970s: 3.38
1980s: 3.23
1990s: 3.19
2000s: 3.18
2010s: 3.15
This has been a steady trend going back to the 1960s, but it, too, is accelerating. Here are the lowest ratios during this span:
LOWEST RATIOS OF INF TO OF CHANCES SINCE 1950
2019: 3.00
2018: 3.01
1992: 3.09
2007: 3.10
1990: 3.10
The last two seasons have not been just the lowest; they've been the lowest by far. Which puts the focus squarely back on the defensive hubs of the two areas of the field, shortstops on the dirt and center fielders on the grass.
During the 1960s and '70s, shortstops handled more than five chances per game in every season except 1963, when they came in at 4.98. During the 1960s, that was more than twice as many chances per game as center fielders. If you consider the ratio of shortstop to center field chances in terms of five-year averages, the number peaked at 2.07 in 1969. It dropped to around 1.78 by 1978, but then remained largely stable until 2006, when it began to tumble again. The two lowest ratios have come in the past two seasons: 1.58 last season, and 1.61 so far in 2019.
To state all of that in plain English: The difference in raw plays made per game by shortstops and center fielders has never been smaller than it is right now. So far this season, shortstops are handling 3.98 chances per game, or 14.8 percent of non-catcher fielding chances. Other than last season, those numbers have never been lower. Center fielders, on the other hand, are handling 2.47 chances per game, which even with all the strikeouts is a higher number than it was in the 1960s. The percentage of non-catcher chances handled by center fielders is at 9.15 percent, down a smidge from last year's 9.18. Those are the highest figures on record.
Still, as you can see at a glance, shortstops do continue to get more chances -- 3.98 versus 2.47. However, consider the impact of those chances. If a shortstop doesn't make a play on a ball in his area, chances are it's going to be a one-base play -- a single, a batter reaching on error, etc. Sometimes there might be a fluke double or a two-base error mixed in there, but the stakes are fairly low for any one play.
However, a play a center fielder doesn't make has a much more stark impact -- doubles, triples, even home runs, given how many over-the-fence robberies we see these days. According to Statcast, the expected wOBA on an average ground ball is about .229; for fly balls, that number is .403. The difference in run impact is enormous, and the difference in total plays made between shortstops and center fielders has shrunken to the point that it sure looks like it has impacted the traits by which teams now deploy their players.
Is this a good thing? Bad? Neutral? Probably that last one. And none of this means we aren't in a golden age for shortstop hitting. We clearly are. But one reason for that is that the style of baseball being played in 2019 has allowed teams to keep more good hitters at the position. Because, defensively speaking, there has never been less for shortstops to do.
Extra innings
1. The other night, Erik Swanson of the Mariners took a no-hitter into the sixth inning of a start at Cleveland. The little "no-hitter" notification flashed on the scoreboard I had open on my tablet, as it does any time a pitcher gets into the sixth inning without having allowed a hit. Excitement! I clicked on the game and the first thing I did was check the pitch count. It was, I believe, 96. Well, there was no way Erik Swanson was going to no-hit the Indians by himself with that pitch count. Not in 2019.
When all of that sunk in, I clicked back to the main scoreboard and went back to whatever I was doing. Frankly speaking: I did not have any more or less interest in that particular game based on the fact that one of the teams hadn't gotten a hit. Multipitcher no-hitters hold no allure for me. At all. In fact, on the list of official no-hitters in the record books, I'd vote to throw them out.
No-hitters are a wonderful thing, and like everyone, I was thrilled when Oakland's Mike Fiers threw one just a few days later. But this multipitcher no-hitter thing is bound to become a scourge. Starters have shorter leashes than ever. Managers have never been less prone to allow a starter nursing a no-no to reach unsafe pitch counts. Hits themselves have rarely been more scarce. All the ingredients are there for a steady accumulation of these abominable multipitcher no-hitters.
So how about we agree right now to purify the record book in this regard and give these things the attention they deserve: no more than any other game.
2. Last Sunday, the Padres beat Kenley Jansen and the Dodgers on a dramatic two-out grand slam from Hunter Renfroe in the ninth inning. It was a great moment in San Diego's budding season. Lost in the shuffle of Renfroe's blow was that the bases were loaded with no outs because of back-to-back bunt singles by Manuel Margot and Wil Myers, which followed Eric Hosmer's leadoff single. That put Jansen into a bind that he wasn't able to quite wriggle out of, thanks to Renfroe. Still, the small-ball display before the big blow caught my eye.
So I looked it up and, sure enough, bunt singles have been more of a weapon this season. There have been 107 bunt hits, all singles. Some of those were likely failed sacrifices, but let's ignore that for now. We're on pace for 447 bunt hits this season. That would be more than the past couple of seasons, but would still be a much lower number than even five or 10 years ago. That's because as non-pitcher sacrifice attempts have dried up, the opportunities for bunt singles have diminished. The scale of this is tough to calculate, since there is no way that I can glean from my data which attempts have been pure bunt-for-a-hit tries.
However, there is one possible way to consider the impact of the increase in bunts: the batting average on bunts. This isn't a real number because successful sacrifices are weeded out, whereas accidental bunt singles on sac attempts are not. But still, the number is interesting: Hitters this season have a .440 average on bunts, up from the .397 mark they posted each of the past two seasons.
That average jumps to .502 if you remove pitchers from the data -- 103 of the 107 bunt hits have been by non-pitchers. That is a high for any season of the data, from TruMedia.com, which dates back to 2009. The overall average for hitters since 2009 on bunts is .450.
Does this mean that hitters are finally bunting extreme defensive shifts out of existence? Sadly, that's probably not even close to being true.
However, there is one player with four bunt hits through Wednesday: Nationals rookie Victor Robles. Three of those hits have come against non-standard defenses. And there are four players with three bunt hits, and many of those have come against skewed alignments: Kyle Schwarber (two of his three bunt hits), Kolten Wong (two) and Myers (two). The other player with three bunt hits is Adam Eaton, but none of those have come against shifts.
Is this small-sample stuff or are more batters learning how to bunt into the gaping voids left by shifted defenses? Well, the raw number of shifts is up, again, so the bunting isn't stemming that tide just yet. But perhaps Robles, Schwarber, Wong and Myers will spur a trend to combat shifts in just the way that many fans have been telling hitters to do for several years now.
3. The Houston Astros are on pace to score 823 runs this season. That's a good number, ranking ninth in the majors. Their OPS+ (127) ranks first, so once you account for league and home park, that run total suddenly looks wildly misleading. Let's underscore "wildly" as the qualifier in that sentence. It's not just baseball-reference.com, which houses OPS+. At FanGraphs.com, the Astros' offense ranks first with a wRC+ of 129. That means Houston has been 29 percent better than league average, 9 percent better than second-place Seattle.
Here is the reason I bring this up: That wRC+ number, at the moment, is the highest of all time, three points better than a second-place team you might have heard of. That would be the 1927 Yankees.
Obviously the disconnect between Houston's solid run pace and its historical advance metrics is playing into this -- there is a lot of contextualizing going on there. So I wouldn't run out and start shouting at people that the Astros have the greatest offense of all time. (You probably shouldn't do that even if it were true.) The sample size, here in the second week of May, remains small as well. Seattle's second-place wRC+ ranks seventh in history. We don't yet know the real levels of these offenses.
But it's something to watch. The Astros' attack has raced to an impressive start and we know that Houston's lineup is packed with high-end hitters, mostly players in their prime. Maybe this is a historic team, and since wRC+ and even OPS+ aren't metrics that exactly roll off the tongue, let's hope people notice if this turns out to be the case.