>"The increase in frequency and efficiency of defensive shifts. According to FanGraphs, teams are shifting at a rate nearly 10 times greater than six years ago"
This should be more prominent and is likely the root cause of guys swinging for homeruns more often. Every hitter will eventually fall into a pattern where they're hitting certain pitches to only a certain part of the field. With the increase in data it's much easier for teams to recognize these patterns and position their fielders to compensate. So if you made your living hitting line drive basehits to shallow left field, halfway through the season every team will pick up on that and place an extra infielder right in your sweet spot. The same hits that got you through college and into the major leagues are now outs. This has been such a huge change that MLB thought about outlawing defensive shifts (I personally enjoy seeing the constant back and forth of strategy between offensive and defense which has always been a part of the major leagues). The obvious solution like the article mentions comes down to "the one ball that can’t be caught is the one that lands in the seats".
This is also highly dependent on the type of hitter. If you're Yankee's 6'7" right fielder Aaron Judge then swinging for the fences with a higher launch angle makes perfect sense. However, if you're Dee Gordon, one of the fastest players in the league who weighs about 175lbs, keeping the ball low is probably still going to result in higher batting and slugging percentages. Guys like Bryce Harper who can hit for power and average do seem to be leaning more towards power, which used to only happen later in their career (ex. Barry Bonds). In my observation, it seems like players such as Dee Gordon are slowly becoming obsolete as teams are prefering the long ball to playing "small ball". You certainly don't see as many teams with a true, stereotypical "leadoff guy" these days and many teams seem stacked with guys who would have been labelled "cleanup hitters" 10 years ago.
It is awesome how the tactics keep changing to respond to strategic changes. There will also be a shift towards training to hit towards both sides of the infield. Not everyone can be a power hitter, and classic baseball includes a lot of "small-ball" hitting.
The increase in power hitting is also cyclical in baseball. Remember last time it dropped it was due to changes in drug testing policies and procedures which may also be a cat and mouse game.
I think speed will still be valuable as stolen bases continue to decrease across the league, as long as those hitters can still get on base at a .320+ clip. But speed is what makes players who can do it all, like Altuve, MVP candidates now.
I see no evidence that speed is meaningful re recent MVPs.
Harper, Trout, Stanton, Bryant, Donaldson, Cabrera, Posey, Josh Hamilton, Pujols, Votto, Pedroia, Ryan Howard, Morneau, Mauer - none of them are defined by speed. Trout has stolen a few bases, but he's not particularly fast.
The actual results indicate it's quite the opposite, MVP hitters have been on the slower side. Power very clearly matters more than speed. What nearly all the last 20 MVP hitters have in common is substantial power production, while being on the slow side.
Like you mention, that's only been a trend in the last 25 years or so. Prior to that, there was some pride is in being a 30/30, 20/50, 40/20, 50/20 and more rarely, a 40/40 player. All of which could get one easily recognized as an MVP. Furthermore, the trend to long ball vs. small ball is that long ball is seen as offensive strategy that has no defense. And I think McGwire and especially Bonds, Sosa had a lot to do with it. Bonds and Sosa came up as solid candidates for 30/30 seasons. Bonds did do a few seasons of 20/50 before he almost entire switched to long ball. And when you could have players that could guarantee a homerun every 10-20 ABs, it's easy to see why long ball is seen as feasible. What's sad that Bonds was an incredibly talented hitter before he went down his long ball route. I mean, he still hit for a high average, slugging percentage, and OBP. But he used to be able to hit the situation, go the other way to avoid a double situation, and he always had an eye for walks. What was incredible to watch was that he overnight (at least it felt that way) cause teams to simply intentionally walk him 50% of the time.
In the 40s-60s and into the 70s maybe, hitters were more balanced. I think of sluggers like Williams, Mays, Mantle, Yaz, Kilebrew, Foster, McCovey, Kingman, etc. The introduction of the forkball, splitter, and changeup in the late 70s and 80s had a lot to do with the down turn in power. Hitter's technologically behind so to speak. In today's baseball, there's almost no room for a more balanced hitter like Gwynn, Boggs, Rose, Carew. Guys who only got 50-60 RBIs, a dozen or two homeruns, stole 15 bases, but who could bat for .350 in a given year and over 200 hits.
It used to be taught, speed has no off days. That doesn't seem to be true anymore.
Sorry, didn't mean it was necessarily reflected in MVP voting from the old guard of writers, more in modern sabermetrics. Trout for example, a perennial 30/30+ candidate, his speed, baserunning and defensive play are a big part of what makes him such a generational player.
The other way to beat the shift -- which few teams/players have adopted -- is to bunt more. Which doesn't require speed, but is more effective with speed.
I've noticed it's a thing the Cubs seem to be doing a bit of; Anthony Rizzo (who maybe isn't a great example given he's not a speedy base-stealer) gets shifted on a lot, and has laid down a few bunt hits this year as a way to beat it.
You really need to pick your spots as a hitter there. For power hitters like Rizzo, opposing teams would LOVE if he bunted against the shift instead of swung for the fences. If he does it even more often, you put your 3B on the grass. Getting in their heads and making sluggers change their approach at the plate is already a win for opposing managers.
Most modern hitters seem to be really bad at bunting. A lot of times you'll see someone literally push the bat forward into the ball, which is literally the opposite of how to execute a good bunt. I think of bunting like free throws in basketball; they're both things that really seem like they should be so easy, and yet some of the best players really seem to struggle with it.
I don't know for sure if Malcolm Gladwell's claim that the granny shot is a better free throw technique is correct, but I would definitely say that there's a correlation between FTs and bunting in that ego gets in the way of perfecting both. So many lefty hitters that get shifted could hit at a .750 clip with even minimally competent bunting to third that pitchers manage to master in their off time.
I'm really skeptical about the granny shot. The legend of the granny shot mostly comes from the free throw record of Rick Barry, who is admittedly an all-time great from the line, but he's also the only all-time great to shoot that way, and he doesn't even have the best career free throw percentage in NBA history. Complicating matters even further, the WNBA player with the best career free throw percentage, Elena Delle Donne, has a free throw percentage a couple points higher than any NBA player (making her perhaps the most proficient free throw shooter in the history of professional basketball) and even she shoots overhand: http://www.basketball-reference.com/wnba/players/d/delleel01...
It doesn't make a lot of sense to have two completely different shot mechanics that you have to practice and train. Aside from Rick Barry, every good free throw shooter seems to use a variation on their normal shooting mechanic, sometimes starting with a consistent dribbling ritual to get them into rhythm (e.g. Rip Hamilton or Klay Thompson). Poor free throw shooters tend to be people who either don't have great shot mechanics in the first place or people who struggle with the unique mental pressure of free throw shooting. In the flow of a game it's hard to overthink yourself and get psyched out, so even guys like Bruce Bowen who could nail catch-and-shoot corner threes sometimes struggled when the game slowed down enough for the pressure to sink in.
Bunting to me seems more akin to the kind of "dirty work" that great players master and good players think they're above doing, like setting hard screens and making an effort on defense. If you're a really good bunter, you're not gonna have the kinds of numbers and highlight plays that lead to fame or fortune. Similarly, if you set hard screens or close off passing lanes or do a lot of the hard work that leads to wins but don't really lead to great individual stats, people are going to ignore you and assume a stat-chasing ball hog like Russell Westbrook is better than you.
It's not "the best players" who struggle with free throws so much as the taller players. That's probably because if you're seven feet tall, it's a lot easier for you to become a valuable player at the NBA level than if you're six feet tall, so guards tend to have more developed skills than centers. Though even this is starting to change in recent years.
I've seen a physics analysis which indicates that being very tall is actually a disadvantage for shooting free throws because the ball approaches the hoop at a shallower angle. Essentially they're aiming for a smaller target. Shorter players have to throw the ball up in a higher arc.
That's true to some extent. Hand size can also make it more difficult to hit shots. But then again, there are plenty of examples of extremely tall players or players with extremely large hands who can still hit free throws reliably.
The main difference is probably that if you're seven feet tall and athletic, you have ways of providing value on the basketball court that outweigh being a liability from the free throw line. Not so much if you're much smaller than that.
Possibly. My guess is that only the exceptionally good leadoff guys will make it to a team, making them more expensive. Other teams might rather have a slugger hitting first than an average fast guy. I guess we'll have to wait and see.
> Other teams might rather have a slugger hitting first than an average fast guy.
I remember seeing a Red Sox-Blue Jays game at Fenway Park last year where the Blue Jays had Jose Bautista hitting first, which definitely fits this description.
If I remember correctly, that was actually Bautista's idea when the team was in a slump. The manager decided to give it a try, and the team started winning so Bautista saw quite a few games batting leadoff.
That's really cool! Honestly, it seemed really weird to me at first, but I guess if you don't have a tradional leadoff type guy, putting someone who gets on a base a lot is the next best thing, and Bautista certainly walks a lot.
I mean, it's not a terrible idea to put someone like Votto or Belt even at the top spot. These guys have very high OBPs who can work the count and coax out tons of walks. If they can get on base, that's really all that matters so the next guy in line can try to get them in.
The theory has always been that those sluggers would be the ones driving people in, rather than counting on the guys behind to drive them in. So it's an interesting tradeoff - more people on base with worse hitters behind them who may not get them in or great hitters who are great at driving people in, but there might not be anyone on.
I remember earlier last year when the Red Sox were batting Betts, Pedroia, Bogaerts, and Ortiz as their first four and Betts was hitting a ton of home runs, my father and I thought that they go Pedroia, Bogaerts, Betts, Ortiz since Bogaerts had little power and Pedroia kept hitting into a lot of double plays. A few weeks later, they started doing Pedroia, Bogaerts, Ortiz, Betts, which was actually even better since then opposing pitchers couldn't safely walk Ortiz.
Exactly. That then means actual performance doesn't matter to many fans, which is unfortunate considering how interesting this kind of data is and how players use it to improve their game.
Of course performance matters, just not for voting for a meaningless game (that was stupidly given meaning). Schwarber isn't going to be suddenly become thrilled with how well his season is going just because he finishes fifth in ASG voting.
> That then means actual performance doesn't matter to many fans
of course performance matters, but you missed my point: a large amount of fans completely ignore statistical performance. This is most evident with Giants fans in particular this season who absolutely despise Hunter Strickland and say he should be kicked from the team when he's been pitching at least league average, if not better, and has been the best relief pitcher on the team. Not to mention they call him a "home run vending machine" when he's only given up 4 in the past 1.5 seasons.
I think Giants fans would treat their players better if the team was 11 games over .500 instead of under and if their best reliever wasn't league average. I'm not saying all fans are rational, many are emotional/ignorant and act on perceived performance rather than real performance. Don't know much about Strickland's career, but if he was perfect with a 3 run lead but awful with a 1 run lead, it makes sense why fans wouldn't be thrilled despite the underlying stats. But most do care about performance, and they won't pretend like Schwarber has been good this year. His popularity is heavily reliant on his past performance, including the World Series.
Nah, their complaints about Strickland happened last year as well, even into the NLDS, when he had only given up 4 home runs all year. He does well in most situations. If anything when he was still a rookie he needed to improve because he only had one pitch, but now he has a few.
Fast guys that can place hits have always been extremely rare (and will always be), even when they were considered a lot more valuable. There may be ten guys in the last 50 years that could do that at a high level, consistently, for a career.
Ichiro, Clemente, Rose who else? Gwynn (who was small and fast in the beginning of his career)? Henderson had a lot of pop and wasn't notably fast. Edgar Martinez had no speed at all but could hit for an insane average.
At the same time, the teams who shift are the teams who lose the most often. Obviously this is correlation, not causation, but it does make me doubt the efficacy of the shift.*
*I'm on my phone so I can't find the source for this at the moment, but did see it in an article in the last few months.
Brandon Belt gets shifted all the time and it's been interesting to see how/when he beats the shift. Sometimes there will be a huge opening, which would allow him to hit toward the opposite field.
Usually a team will pitch to the shift though. Ex. if the shift is to the left side on a right handed batter they're not going to throw him a fastball on the outside corner. And it's much harder to take an inside pitch to the opposite field. Then again, a good hitter will recognize this, set up for the inside pitch, and launch it over the fence.
More than once, David Ortiz reached on a bunt in the shift. (For those unaware, he's a large man who is not known for his speed).
It was arguably a net loss to have him bunt though, as a medium chance of a single might not make up for the loss of the extra-bases he would hit for otherwise.
Regardless of analytics, baseball is a game of reactions. Pitchers who traditionally made pitches to induce popups will inevitably change to induce grounders (by pitch choice, location, and/or speed). The beauty of the sport is that the sample sizes can get large enough to make legitimate inferences from the data unlike many other sports.
For those not too familiar with professional baseball, there are 162 games in a season. A player starting every game would likely see 600+ at bats. A starting pitcher pitches every 5-6 days and will face 600+ batters per season. League wide there are about 125k outs recorded per season on 700k pitches.
That's a ton of data. It allows you to ask questions like "What is the likelihood that a curveball is thrown for a strike on a 3-0 count in the 8th inning?" and get statistically significant results.
For those wanting to play w/ the data, there are a lot of resources [0]. I personally have combined older retrosheet data [1] with modern MLB data to some neat uses, not the least of which to try out tech like Druid (big data, live slicing, etc). E.g. If you wanted data from Sunday's Houston vs Texas game, GDX has tons of XML for parsing at [2]. There are plenty of guides that tell you what is what of course. It has been on my mind to develop a tensorflow graph trained w/ existing data to help me win some FanDuel/DraftKings money, but I haven't as of yet (and I should note the MLB data has restrictions against bulk or commercial use).
Thank you so much for these links. Recently I've thought about building something data viz and stats related using baseball stats.
I know MLBAM has a bunch of data they keep to themselves, but I should definitely be able to find something to play with here. Many thanks for sharing!
> It allows you to ask questions like "What is the likelihood that a curveball is thrown for a strike on a 3-0 count in the 8th inning?" and get statistically significant results.
Does it though? medicine is learning that when you do data mining the bar for statistical significance needs to be much higher. When you do the traditional hypothesis/experiment loop and a result hits 95% likely that is good enough. However when you data mine from millions of data points anything interesting is much more likely to be coincidence. Modern statistics is trying to figure out how to handle this.
Data mining is good for generating hypothesis that you can then test with a controlled experiment. It can be used in meta-analysis to find small effects that were not significant in individual experiments but when you combine them they are significant. However it is dangerous to use it alone.
In more depth, if you look at 100 data points and find 5 things that meet the 95% bar - that is 5 out of 100, odds are that all of them are false positives since you studied 100 things and found 5. (this is a gross simplification of things like p-values, real statisticians will cry about it, but the average person has a chance of understanding)
My impression with experience in bioinformatics is that these issues are likely not shared.
Biological systems are highly variable and absurdly complex, and most datasets come with a host of confounding factors. In comparison, baseball is extremely uniform, and the variability that does exist can often be quantified effectively, and more importantly, often is. Biologists can dream of such high-quality and thorough data, but that's a long way off. This means that the analysis used is quite different.
Genomic data depends greatly on the material used and the methods used. For instance, even with consistent genotypes and identical library preparation, if you collected your RNA a few hours later in the day, you now have a host of circadian changes to contend with that confound your analysis. No one can effectively keep track of all the confounding factors. This means that most analysis needs to be done with direct controls, biological replicates, etc.
In terms of actual analysis, I think the problem is somewhat overstated in your assessment. There are good statistical methods to adjust for multiple comparisons, and the field has largely caught-up to the biggest issues. This was perhaps more accurate 5 years ago, and was mostly the result of poor statistical literacy.
It's not just this season, though. For many types of baseball statistics, full records are available going back decades, and for some statistics there's literally a century's worth of information. Which allows us to ask questions about trends over time and be pretty confident that the answers are the answers, and not just misinterpreted noise.
People tend to underestimate just how much information there is on baseball, and how well-kept it has been.
As many have said this is a tactical reaction to changes in pitching and defense.
It always amazes me how balanced the game of baseball is compared to other sports. It's been around for more than a century and people have become so much stronger and faster on both sides of the ball. Still, offense and defense remain so perfectly matched. The bases remain 90 feet apart and the pitcher still throws from 60 feet away. A home run is still 400 feet.
Consider basketball which has had to dramatically rebalance the rules over time. Restrictions on time in the paint, the 3 point line, perimeter defense, etc. Or how hockey changed all the rules after the lockout. Or how football has totally re worked pass defense and special teams.
Keep in mind a lot of various and regional changes happened early in baseball's history and that baseball as a professional sport is much older than football or basketball.
Ground rule doubles were briefly home runs in some leagues, foul balls once didn't count as strikes, then you could strike out on a foul ball, intentional walk changes, spitballs outlawed, balk rules ...
Baseball was probably just as fluid in its first thirty-forty years as basketball, it was just a long time ago.
Baseball, like any other sport, has gone under many revisions to its rules throughout its history. The only statement you say has never changed that I can tell is the bases have been 90 feet apart since 1840. Pitchers have not always pitched from 60' 6" from the plate and home run distance, park size from plate, varies even today.
Interestingly the park sizes differ to try and keep the difficulty of a home run equal in lieu of differences in air pressure between locations. It is rumored the Red Sox added a bullpen to give their new recruit Ted Williams, who was a left handed batter, an advantage at home.
Around the beginning of Ken Burns' Baseball, Bob Costas made a similar point about distance. I suppose play could adapt to a certain degree but I have to believe that base paths that were 10%, much less 20%, longer or shorter would produce a radically different game.
As others have noted, there have been some adjustments. But I agree with your basic point.
(Not that I could ever get through that particular series. It was longer than the Civil War :-))
The most glorious thing about that series is how clearly public domain the soundtrack is... nothing but jangly, often unrecognizably slow piano renditions of "The Star Spangled Banner", "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and "Dixie". PBS is the coolest.
There's been various changes over the years, juggling points for tries and penalties, introducing sin bins, and so on, but it isn't really anything fundamental.
Where you do see changes has been in the physique of players, and to some extent it's cyclical. Teams adapt to circumstances, player sizes and types change, and then some outlier will come along and with a visionary coach shake things up again.
Wings used to be lighter sprinters, then Jonah Lomu came along and proved that wings could be big (at 6' 5" he towered over most players, average height for the time was 6' 1") and still fast.
People just didn't have the strength or weight to stop him, especially out on the wings. Players of sufficient size would typically be one of the forwards, the bigger players that dominate a scrum.
Teams adapted to the new paradigm though, wingers started getting bigger and stronger as tactics changed, and we've seen size and weight fluctuate back and forth a bit, sometimes internationals favour lighter faster, sometimes slightly slower but stronger.
Ehh, I'm in a club with some old timer alumni, and the stories they tell (and 1970s rugby videos on Youtube I've seen) tell a different story.
Even 20 years ago at a club level, many things were allowed that aren't now: Quicker scrums, high tackles, raking the ruck with cleats, and general hooliganism seem to have been more par for the course than today.
I saw a match from 1977, and there was no Croutch/Bind/Set. The scrum just walked up toward each other and engaged immediately. More dangerous, but a lot different than today. The line-outs didn't lift; the hooker threw the ball in like a football lob.
The reason for advent of behemoths like Lomu was the allowing of wholesale substitutions.
This meant that players no longer had to play the full 80 minutes and so endurance could be sacrificed for power.
This in turn has likely contributed to the increase in serious injuries in the game, particularly concussions.
Rugby has changed a hell of a lot since the advent of professionalism in 1995 and they probably need to row some of those changes back imo.
I think that's more a matter of what the organizers think is best commercially than a signal that baseball is special. Like many other games, it allows people in a wide range of capabilities to play a game that is enjoyable to watch. That would probably be different if not for rule changes. For example, requiring wooden bats at top level likely was necessary to prevent offense from overpowering defense.
(That may be a somewhat generic pattern. In both tennis and table tennis, rules were adjusted when players started hitting the ball too hard. Similarly, in javelin throwing, the javelin was changed a few times to prevent players from throwing it out of the stadium)
Wasn't there something about the infield fly rule? :)
But the same goes for soccer which has altered very little since the rules were laid down in the 19th century.
The game changed completely after the (first) war when the offside rule was introduced. But that was almost 100 years ago. Since then the rule changes have essentially been tweaks.
The offside rule's been there since long before WW1.
They did alter the number of defending players needed to put a player on-side down from 3 to 2 in the mid 1920's.
I'd argue that was altering an existing rule rather than a fundamental rule change though.
Then the other massive change was "no one can be offside when the ball is played" to "no one in an offside position can attempt to play the ball". Totally changed the way the offside trap was practiced, I believe.
The biggest change in my memory was the one that stopped the endless passes back to the keeper by preventing him from picking it up if it had been kicked back. Also worth mentioning is the 3 points for a win I suppose.
The scrolling infographic was a very nice touch, especially with the DBZ style animation.
It's only natural that in little league coaches tell players to hit ground balls because kids have trouble fielding (it requires extreme precision, speed, and dexterity).
It's also quite obvious that you have to hit the ball high and hard to get a triple or home-run. Good to know data backs this up.
Interesting how the article mentions it would seem intuitive to someone new to the game as well. Just hit where there's less defense and more area to cover, the outfield.
Sure, more area to cover but also a lot more time to get there. It's less trying to hit to the outfield, but rather hit homeruns. The problem is that it's easier said than done, and the old philosophy (look at Ichiro for example), was higher average and putting the ball in play was preferable to loading up and trying to hit a homerun. Now strikeouts and homeruns are way up, but batting averages are down.
I wonder if it is just chance that the 2016 average launch angle appears as though it may have favorable outcomes over the broadest range of exit velocities, and just below the angle where the distribution begins to go bimodal? It would be interesting to see how the featured players' hitting is distributed over speed and elevation (and if I am really interested, I am sure I can find the data...)
Was there an answer to the question in the title? Just better analytics on the offensive side of things? They mention Oakland A's value approach in getting players.
Clearly wouldn't have been a good choice for Ichiro..
I may be that the moneyball strategy becomes an architectural one; make the walls taller or less conventional like they used to be in the 1920s and 1930s.
This should be more prominent and is likely the root cause of guys swinging for homeruns more often. Every hitter will eventually fall into a pattern where they're hitting certain pitches to only a certain part of the field. With the increase in data it's much easier for teams to recognize these patterns and position their fielders to compensate. So if you made your living hitting line drive basehits to shallow left field, halfway through the season every team will pick up on that and place an extra infielder right in your sweet spot. The same hits that got you through college and into the major leagues are now outs. This has been such a huge change that MLB thought about outlawing defensive shifts (I personally enjoy seeing the constant back and forth of strategy between offensive and defense which has always been a part of the major leagues). The obvious solution like the article mentions comes down to "the one ball that can’t be caught is the one that lands in the seats".
This is also highly dependent on the type of hitter. If you're Yankee's 6'7" right fielder Aaron Judge then swinging for the fences with a higher launch angle makes perfect sense. However, if you're Dee Gordon, one of the fastest players in the league who weighs about 175lbs, keeping the ball low is probably still going to result in higher batting and slugging percentages. Guys like Bryce Harper who can hit for power and average do seem to be leaning more towards power, which used to only happen later in their career (ex. Barry Bonds). In my observation, it seems like players such as Dee Gordon are slowly becoming obsolete as teams are prefering the long ball to playing "small ball". You certainly don't see as many teams with a true, stereotypical "leadoff guy" these days and many teams seem stacked with guys who would have been labelled "cleanup hitters" 10 years ago.