Do the Twins Need to Shift Better?

Only two teams used more total defensive shifts than the Minnesota Twins in 2019, but the team was barely above-average in terms of net outs created by the shift, according to Baseball Info Solutions (BIS). That might mean that the team needs to be more careful and precise in their deployment of shifts going forward—or it might not.

Based on video analysis and batted-ball data, BIS estimated the Twins lost 162 outs on balls that would not have been hits had they not been in the shift, the second-highest total in MLB. That kind of miss rate, even given the 185 outs the company estimated the team gained through shifting, is frustrating and counterproductive.

Among Twins pitchers, as individuals, José Berríos lost 21 outs because of the shift (though he gained 29). Jake Odorizzi and Taylor Rogers each lost 13 outs that way, and together, they only gained 26 outs through shifts, breaking even. Nor, surely, did it even feel like breaking even, for any of them. Our brains operate in fairly predictable, imperfect ways, and the principles of loss aversion and negativity dominance tell us those three hurlers experienced the frustration and disappointment of losing would-be outs because of the shift much more saliently than they felt the relief and affirmation of hits turned into outs by shifting.

Other aspects of behavioral psychology come into play here, too. When an individual pitcher retroactively assesses their performance on a given day, they will do so with a biased internal eye. They’ll mentally treat the outs generated by shifts as having been a given, or as the product of their own successful pitching to the defense behind them. However, they’ll attribute the balls hit through empty infield halves to poor positional decision-making by the team.

Because shifts are still counted as a separate strategy from the traditional defensive alignment, players, fans, and even members of the coaching staff and front office will tend to treat traditional alignments as the default. That leads to the false notion that deploying a shift is a more proactive decision than not doing so, and by extension, that hits created by the shift are errors of commission by the coaching staff, whereas hits through traditionally aligned defenses are errors of omission. Our minds forgive the latter much more readily than the former.

As I chronicled for the Twins Daily Offseason Handbook back in the fall, the Twins were one of baseball’s most aggressive shifting teams early in the season, but that became less true during the middle and latter portions of the campaign. In particular, the team cut down its shift rate behind its starting pitchers. In light of the data above, that shouldn’t be terribly surprising. It’s likely that several influential members of the pitching staff grew frustrated and pessimistic about shifts, because the team’s shifts seemed to be relatively inefficient.

It’s not clear that that’s true. The numbers from BIS say so, but those numbers are imperfect, themselves. The company uses video analysis and batted-ball data, and compares batted balls against shifts to similar ones without a shift in place, in order to estimate when a hit has been gained or lost due to the shift. However, the applied definition of shifts for this data set isn’t granular enough for us to be sure that apples are really being compared to apples, and oranges to oranges.

More importantly, perhaps, the Twins had a porous defensive infield in 2019, with arguably the worst left side in baseball when Miguel Sanó and Jorge Polanco played side-by-side. Luis Arráez was a valuable addition to the regular lineup, thanks to his bat, but is not a strong defender at second base. It’s perfectly possible that the system, because of the way BIS designed and deploys it, counted as lost a healthy number of outs that the team would not have been able to convert even if they weren’t shifted—that is, that the system blames strategic choices for what were really the shortcomings of the personnel on hand.

Josh Donaldson’s arrival pushes Sanó to first base, a dramatic upgrade when it comes to glovework at third base. In all likelihood, it will also permit the team to position Polanco a bit differently, and there could be cascading effects that make the Twins’ infield defense more effective, whether they’re in the shift or not.

In the meantime, though, the overhauled coaching staff (absent Derek Shelton, Jeremy Hefner, and others) will need to communicate openly and consistently with the players, to assure full faith in shifts as a viable defensive strategy. Broadly, MLB teams need to continue to erode the idea (especially in the minds of players and coaches) that a shift is an active choice, while a traditional alignment is not one. If they can do so, they won’t need to wonder as much about what BIS (or any other data source) says about the efficacy of their shifts, and will be better able to position defenders optimally, according to the tendencies of the pitcher and opposing batter.

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