{"id":8461,"date":"2019-10-29T15:20:59","date_gmt":"2019-10-29T19:20:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/2019\/10\/29\/research-shows-baseball-needs-more-radical-shifts\/"},"modified":"2022-11-06T18:31:28","modified_gmt":"2022-11-06T23:31:28","slug":"research-shows-baseball-needs-more-radical-shifts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/research-shows-baseball-needs-more-radical-shifts\/","title":{"rendered":"Research shows baseball shifts need to happen more, and be more radical"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unlike many baseball fans, Furman math majors Andrew Hartley \u201920 and Ella Morton \u201920 don\u2019t have a problem with the rise of the shift. What they do have a problem with is teams like the Houston Astros, currently battling the Washington Nationals in the 2019 World Series, earning a reputation for \u201cradical\u201d defensive alignments<\/a> when the reality is, just like everybody else in the league, they\u2019re not shifting nearly enough.<\/p>\n

At least, that\u2019s according to the results of their two-year research project, \u201cSwing Shift: A Mathematical Approach to Defensive Shifting.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to the math, Hartley says, \u201cif you\u2019re shifting, you might as well go all the way and try to cover as many points as possible. To do that, if there\u2019s nobody on base you really only need three infielders (not counting the pitcher and catcher).”<\/p>\n

Hartley and Morton conducted the research with three Furman faculty members who have carved a national niche<\/a> for themselves with sports-inspired mathematical research \u2013 John Harris \u201991 and Kevin Hutson, both professors of math, and Liz Bouzarth, an associate math professor \u2013 as well as Ben Grannan, an assistant professor of business and accounting. Grannan helped Hartley and Morton code the program they used to solve the model they created.<\/p>\n

\"Graphic

This in an image Hartley and Morton have been using while presenting their research. On the left are “heat maps” showing where Chicago Cubs first baseman Anthony Rizzo, top, and New York Mets third baseman Todd Frazier hit the ball in 2019. On the right are the resulting optimal placements for defensive players according to Hartley’s and Morton’s research.<\/p><\/div>\n

A shift is when players move away from their traditional positions to areas where data show the batter is most likely to hit the ball.\u00a0For example, most right-handed batters hit the ball to the third-base side of the field, and vice versa for lefties.<\/p>\n

Shifts \u2013 even \u201cradical\u201d ones \u2013 are almost always limited to teams sliding their third baseman and shortstop one position to the right, or they\u2019ll move the second baseman to the left side of the infield with the third baseman and shortstop. The outfielders remain generally where they usually are.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re only putting three people in the infield, which is very different from how baseball is traditionally played. And it\u2019s doing better than a traditional placement,\u201d Morton said. “What\u2019s special about what we\u2019re doing is we\u2019re looking at all the players. The first baseman has to stay around first base, but the other six can go anywhere.”<\/p>\n

And that’s something even the Astros \u2013 who have ranked first<\/a>, first<\/a> and second<\/a> over the last three years in percentage of plate appearances with a defensive shift \u2013 haven\u2019t been doing with anything approaching regularity. The study shows that\u2019s a mistake.<\/p>\n

To determine where to place defensive players, Hartley and Morton collected data on every fair ball hit by 20 major league batters \u2013 10 right-handed and 10 left-handed \u2013 from 2014 to 2018 and developed a coordinate system for the field. Then they determined the chance a fielder has of covering a given point based on his distance from it and\u00a0employed integer programing<\/a> to maximize batter-specific coverage, adding extra weight to areas most likely to result in extra-base hits if the ball is hit there.<\/p>\n

They assumed no runners on base, and the pitcher and catcher weren’t part of the equation. Constraints were the first baseman had to remain close enough to cover first, and two other players had to remain in the infield.<\/p>\n

Once they had come up with their defensive positioning, Hartley and Morton tested their model using 2019 hit data to simulate 10,000 balls in play by each of the 20 batters. The result was a 5.9-percent average drop in predicated BABIP<\/a> (batting average on balls in play) for right-handed batters and 8 percent for left-handers.<\/p>\n

For lefties, that turns a .300 hitter into one with a much-more-pedestrian .276 batting average.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe main takeaway was four infielders was great, that\u2019s standard, but what if you did three? Hartley said. \u201cYou might get a much better coverage because that fourth infielder might not really be doing a ton for you if you\u2019re using the other three optimally.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A

This is an example of a spray chart shown to viewers during Game 4 of the 2018 National League Division Series between the Atlanta Braves and Los Angeles Dodgers. The numbers indicate the percentage of time Los Angeles batter Max Muncy hits to those locations on the field and where Braves defenders were positioned as a result.<\/p><\/div>\n

Televised games will frequently feature \u201cspray charts\u201d \u2014 \u00a0colorful graphics that slice the field into pieces based on the percentage of time a batter hits to those areas. But moving individual players based on that information doesn\u2019t reflect the most efficient way for a team to defend the hitter, which is what sets the Hartley-Morton model apart.<\/p>\n

Their system places fielders in relation to one another while also incorporating risk of extra-base hits.<\/p>\n

The students\u2019 results \u201cshowed the optimized defensive player locations,\u201d Grannan said. \u201cAs far as we can tell, teams were doing more of an ad-hoc approach or quick rule-of-thumb approach instead of actually trying to build a novel, mathematical model to try to best shift the players.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hartley and Morton didn\u2019t realize how cutting-edge their results were until they presented at the Saberseminar<\/a> in August in Boston. The Saberseminar is an annual conference devoted to the latest in baseball research and analysis and featured representatives from all 30 major league teams.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought that what we were doing was kind of unoriginal; it was just uncovering what they were doing,\u201d Hartley, a native of Annapolis, Maryland, said. \u201cBut when I talked with the head of the Astros analytics department, he was like, ‘It\u2019s not even certain if all 30 of the teams are asking the same questions, and if they are, they\u2019re being answered in 25 completely different ways.\u2019 That\u2019s pretty shocking.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Unlike many baseball fans, Furman math majors Andrew Hartley \u201920 and Ella Morton \u201920 don\u2019t have a problem with the rise of the shift. What they do have a problem […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,26,20,50,30,55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-administrative","category-business-and-accounting","category-mathematics","category-top-stories","category-undergraduate-research"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8461\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}