Was Banning the Shift Ever Going to Help Batting Averages?
Scoring is down and batting average is at a 56-year low. Weren't the new rules supposed to fix this?
As Jeff Tracy pointed out in Yahoo’s sports newsletter last week, the offensive shine has begun to wear off of baseball’s new rule changes instituted for last season (to mostly good reviews, including from me). Leaguewide runs per game are down to 4.36 from 4.68 last season — drawing closer to 2022’s 4.28 figure again — and batting average is down from .248 to .242 — tied with famously pitcher-friendly 1967 for the second-lowest in a season since 1908.
While the rule changes around pace of play continue to work well — average time of game is down from 2:39 last season to 2:35 this year, its lowest mark since 1984 — and pickoff rules have boosted stolen-base attempts per game into a tie for their highest level (0.93) since 1999, the ban of the infield shift hasn’t seemed to increase hitting success as much as MLB had been hoping.
But maybe those hopes were always misplaced anyway.
For one thing, strikeouts are the elephant in the batting-average room. In the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, they made up a record 26.4 percent of at-bats, and even now that share is holding at nearly 25 percent. Meanwhile, balls in play — those comparatively more exciting plays involving fielders, which made up more than 84 percent of at-bats as recently as the early 1980s — were below a 70 percent share in 2020 and are at just 72 percent this season.
Since at-bats make up the denominator of batting average — and a strikeout is an at-bat where, by definition, the hitter has a batting average of .000 — the greater share of at-bats with a strikeout, the lower the leaguewide batting average will be, regardless of anything the fielders do. The best the powers-that-be can hope for is that banning the shift would entice players to adopt a more contact-centric approach at the plate, turning more ABs into balls in play on the chance they can become a hit.
But given the degree of pitching velocity in today’s game (versus even a generation ago) and the role of raw velo in causing K’s — plus the opportunity cost of giving up power potential at the expense of contact — it might be tough to legislate a lower strikeout rate into the game, short of suggestions like the “qualified start” idea made recently by Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander.
(This is the interesting concept that teams forfeit the designated hitter if they pull their starter too early, potentially forcing pitchers to pace themselves more and throw at something less than maximum velocity, which might reduce arm injuries and make strikeouts less common.)
The other issue with the shift ban is that the evidence was always inconsistent that shifting ever had a huge effect on overall batting average on balls in play (BABIP) in the first place.
Some studies, such as this one by my former colleagues Ben Lindbergh and Rob Arthur in the mid-2010s, showed that players with a certain profile (such as Phillies great Ryan Howard, the prototypical lumbering lefty slugger whose career was hurt by the shift) were indeed affected by higher rates of shifting, even as leaguewide BABIP hadn’t yet moved much in response to the tactic.
There were, however, many other studies that struggled to connect the dots between shift tendencies and BABIP. Because of this, I started out as a shift skeptic, though I eventually came to believe that massive levels of shifting did have an effect: As shifting reached an absurd rate — nearly 40 percent of plate appearances — in 2022, leaguewide BABIP did drop to .290, its lowest mark since a .285 showing in 1992.1
And yet, charts like these are (in retrospect) difficult to square with the idea that shifts were a significant factor in dropping leaguewide BABIP:
Lefty hitters in the Howard mold do seem to have been the beneficiaries of banning the shift, as their BABIP on grounders has risen by nearly 15 points under the new rules. This was not an unforeseen outcome of the rule change, either. But since pure lefties make up only 35 percent of all batters (the most heavily shifted type of lefty is even less than that), and balls are put in play less than in earlier eras, the positive effect of the shift ban was always going to be muted. Overall, the league has a lower BABIP in a zero-shift2 environment than it did when a third of PAs saw a shift.
This is why, for all the victories of the new rules — and I consider the shift ban a win just on an aesthetic basis, because I hated those ugly lopsided alignments from before — MLB might need to go back to the drawing board for even more ways to improve BABIP, reduce strikeouts and increase offense in the game overall.
Filed under: Baseball
And that year, there were 14 percent more balls in play per game, so hitters were still coming out ahead on hits overall.
Granted, with what are called “shades” (the most shift-like positioning possible under the new rules) on about a quarter of all PAs.
Friends will tell you that I've railed against the proposed shift ban since its proposal - perhaps annoyingly so. I never believed that the shift had a material impact on offense once you segment down to the applicable use cases (only some left-handed hitters, not when men were on base, in an era of strikeouts and fly balls via launch angle etc.). You're left with an edge case at best.
If you stared out at the concept of the shift ban for any length of time, you could easily convince yourself that it was a solution in search of a problem. That, when a real solution - bunting for a free base - was obvious, staring everyone right in the face and the sort of small ball that baseball said it wanted back. So, this is perhaps the least surprising result I've seen in some time.
What is surprising - perhaps shocking - is how MLB ignored its own data years back that indicated it wouldn't work as planned. While you heard nonstop talk in the media of the use of pitch clocks in the minor leagues, you heard very little to none about the shift ban experimentation in the minors. What did those efforts say?
As Baseball America's headline revealed in 2022, "Banning Shifts Had Almost No Effect on Batted Ball Outcomes in the Minors." Here is what they concluded, "...it is notable that the other rules changes MLB implemented—namely the pitch clock and larger bases—made measurable differences during testing in the minor leagues. Banning the shift, so far, has not."
So why did MLB move forward with an ineffective rule that their own data told them wouldn't work as planned? That's perhaps a more interesting story that will have to wait for another day.
Two concluding remarks. First, shifting always struck me as more of an outfield strategy than an infield one. Specifically, teams were able to get an additional outfielder in short right field to catch line drives and other balls in the air - not just ground balls. Those would also be captured by BABIP, but I wonder whether teams are now shifting their outfielders positioning to some degree to capture some of this value and that is muting the outcome.
Finally, a suggestion for your drawing board to bring offense back - that some have called "crazy" while others have more politely referred to as "interesting." Specifically, baseball needs to lower the base on ball number to 3 - to match the strikeout number. The number 4 is purely arbitrary and a vestige of the past. Why should pitchers be given an extra bad throw to the disadvantage of the hitter? That feels unfair at a high level.
At a more granular level, affording pitchers an extra pitch before consequences allows them freedom reach back and chase velocity - the malady that everyone is trying to fix. One stat I would be interested in knowing is whether pitch selection and velocity are different based on count today e.g. when the count is full or with two balls on the hitter? If velocity declines with higher ball counts, your problem is further along to being solved.
My assumption is that 4 BB could be reflective of a time when offense was dominant, so pitchers needed a boost to balance the game. A different time. In addition, that number for a base on balls has been lowered in baseball history before, so there is precedent. This also feels less disruptive than moving the mound back which is something that is a discussion point today. So, it's not as crazy as it might seem given the other proposals on the board.
It's time to level the playing field and discourage pitchers from raring back due to an extra windfall pitch before consequences. This move will also make command of pitches more valuable versus only velo.
We have a choice. We can either be bold or wait for MLB to roll out more ineffective carnival-esque ideas like larger bases and shift bans that don't work.