Benchmarks for Shifting & Its Effects

For fantasy baseball writers, this time of year means only one thing, player profiles. Dozens and dozens of player profiles to slog through. While writing up some hitters, I can to the realization I didn’t have a quick method to flag hitters who may be shifted. While I could navigate to the splits page, scroll down, and calculate each player’s shift rate, I wanted a quick and dirty method to flag them. While I went over several methods, I settled on one stat and two values.

I did some shift work for an older edition of a The Hardball Times Annual but I have stayed away from the topic over the last few years. My initial conclusions stand which are the shift really affected some hitters and the rate of effectiveness slowly declines more players are shifted. The shift isn’t going away though. It’s still effective against slow pull hitters.

I initially thought a hitter’s pulled groundball rate would be a major factor, but it was not. Just pull rate was enough.

To start with, I look at left-handed hitters since they get shifted more because it’s easier to hold runs on the right side of the infield. I grouped them by 10% increments to find any trends.

From these values, I decided to use a cutoff of 45% Pull% for those who get shift and those who don’t. Here are how the numbers work out for the two groups.

The 45% Pull is a simple marker to see if lefties are being shifted. The righties are up next with only one righty getting a shift rate over 60%.

They pull the ball quite a bit, but it takes a high pull rate for opposing teams to implement a shift, especially with runners on base. For the right-handed hitters, I set the marker at 50%.

Now the players who may get shifted can be known but are these changes baked into projections. Looking at the historic Steamer projections from 2010 to current, I found how much the projected (Steamer) versus actual OPS differed after adjusting for the changing run environment.

A decent difference (.013) exists with the high-pull, left-handed hitters and is close to .021 OPS change seen earlier. I wonder if the projection system expects more regression from these hitters, but the shift limits the change. Whatever it is, their projection should be adjusted some.

Through all the noise, fantasy owners need to concentrate on adjusting the left-handed hitters who pull the ball over 45% of the time. They don’t live up to their projections. Any other adjustment is just splitting pubic hairs.