Shades of Gray: How the Twins' Most Extreme Defensive Alignments Differ from Other Teams'

If you just watch Twins games on TV, you might not even notice it. In our heads, we've all gotten used to mentally categorizing the alignment of the infield defense based on a simple test: can I see a middle infielder's head at the bottom of the screen, as we watch from the center-field camera? After all, most of the game is fed to us through that lens, looking in from a perch above center field to the main street of baseball: the lane from the pitcher's mound to home plate. When we can see (most often, with a lefty up) the shortstop's or (much less often, because of the specific way many cameras are offset to the right, but occasionally) the second baseman's head at the bottom of the frame, we broadly assume that the defense is deploying the legal version of the old infield shift—now called, a bit euphemistically, "Shades".

The Twins, you might not be shocked to hear, use Shades almost as aggressively as any team in baseball. Until about a week ago, they were second in MLB in the use of them. Now, they've dropped back to fifth, but there's still only one team—the San Diego Padres—who shades more often against lefty batters. The Twins' personnel has shifted (not shaded; I mean the roster and the lineup have actually changed) recently, with Jose Miranda being optioned, Brooks Lee being activated, and Carlos Correa getting hurt, but they remain steadfast in their approach. Rocco Baldelli certainly doesn't foresee changing the frequency with which they deploy their flavors of the shaded defense much, because of these changes.

"The positioning side won’t change more than marginally, based on who we have out on the field," Baldelli said Sunday. "Could it affect some things? Yes. But is it going to affect the overriding way that we put our players on the field? No."

If you think deeply about it, the traditional way of aligning defenders never made that much sense. It was a hedge, basically. It took the field and the four fielders assigned to defend it and scattered them in a roughly even pattern, trying to minimize the chance that a ball hit to any random location would sneak through. But the distribution of batted balls in modern major-league baseball is far from random, and Baldelli doesn't want his club anchored to that outdated mindset.

"We put our guys in certain spots because that’s where the hitters hit the balls, and that’s where they hit balls against certain types of pitchers, specifically," Baldelli said.

Then, however, he made the admission I had been waiting for. With all these moving parts, could the team adjust not whether it uses a shaded infield, but how extreme that shading is?

"Are we talking a step? Yeah. We might open our guys up or close them in toward each other at times, based on who we have on the field," the skipper said. "But it’s not going to be more than small differences."

It's baseball, Rocco. There are no small differences. Let's dig into these.