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The Reds are dead last in Batting Average (BA) at .207, while MLB average is .242. Hitting for average is one aspect of offense. Hitting with power is another. The Reds are 6th out of 30 teams in power, measured by the stat ISO, which is Isolated Power. ISO is a better measure of pure power than the more popular Slugging Percentage (SLG) because SLG includes Batting Average and therefore singles. ISO subtracts the singles out of SLG and measures just extra-base hits. The Reds are 6th in the major leagues in extra-base hits.
What about the third big component of offense, drawing walks? Well, the Reds are 3rd in MLB in walk-rate, behind only Cleveland and the Chicago Cubs.
What’s gone wrong with the Reds offense? Hitting for average. Not power, not on-base skills.
We’ll get back to the hometown team in a minute.
The Reds and their fans don’t have a monopoly on this concern. The claim that “offense is down in baseball in 2020” has become conventional wisdom across MLB. It provides an easy narrative for broadcasters and fertile research ground for analysts. Turns out, most popular explanations are off target, because the underlying premise is wrong. Offense isn’t suffering across baseball. It’s down for left-handed hitters. Right-handed hitters are doing fine.
Armed with that revelation, we have to ask: What’s going on with the lefties?
An answer to that question, one with intuitive appeal, is that teams have been successful aligning their defenses against left-handed batters. This explanation has a nice fit for the particular problem we’re investigating because shifts are designed to affect Batting Average, not power. Shifts involve moving infielders around. Its primary target is singles.
But in the past, when researchers have looked for this cause-and-effect, the impact of the shift on offense, it’s gone missing. That creates warranted skepticism about this explanation. Shifts have been a thing since Ted Williams. With nothing new to defensive shifts in 2020, nothing to see here, right?
Well, not so fast.
Getting Left Out of Batting Average
To explore the impact of the shift, we’re going to use two statistics.
The first stat is as back-of-the-baseball-card as you can find: Batting Average (BA). Simply, BA is the number of hits divided by total at bats. This one is so simple we could calculate it as kids. Batting Average shown as a 3-decimal point number between .000 and 1.000 (the 2020 Reds are hitting .207). Batting Average statistics are kept for players, teams and leagues. From 1970-2020 — that’s a sample size of about 10 million at bats — the Major League BA has been .260. In the past few years, it has fluctuated a few points below that. One of the main pieces of evidence for “offense is down in baseball in 2020” is that the current league Batting Average is .242.
This chart shows how the BA of right-handed hitters has compared with left-handed hitters for each season since 2010, through 2019.
You might call that a romantic walk. The Batting Average for right-handed hitters (RHH) and left-handed hitters (LHH) move together, arm-in-arm. Any gap in recent years has been small. The largest divergence was 4 percent (in 2011 and 2012). The past four seasons, RHH and LHH batting averages have been within two points of each other. That’s close.
Now let’s add the 2020 season:
Whoa. So much for our romantic walk. The LHH have broken off and taken a path less traveled. That’s a 22-point gap (.251 vs. .229). It’s historic. Left-handed Batting Average is the source of the decline of offense in MLB and learning that is the start of figuring out what’s gone wrong with the Reds.
Doing Worse Than Expected
That brings us to our second statistic: Expected Batting Average (xBA).
You won’t find xBA on your baseball card. It’s new. xBA is based on things baseball didn’t have the technology to measure well until the past few years. It operates on the same scale as BA and is calculated the same way, with one change. Instead of the numerator being the number of hits, the numerator is the number of hits you would expect based on how well the ball was hit and how fast the runner is. We’ll need to leave calculating this one to the pros.
To come up with the numerator, for each batted ball an estimate is made of the probability it will become a hit. To do that, the ball’s exit velocity, launch angle and the batter’s sprint speed are compared to every ball hit that same way since 2015. Why 2015? That’s when MLB introduced Trackman radar in big league stadiums. MLB then created Statcast to take that data, calculate stuff from it and make it public.
Think of xBA as the number of hits the batter/team/league should have given average defense, park dimensions and luck. xBA isn’t imaginary. It uses actual batted balls of that player or team, but replaces the specific outcome with the average outcome for that contact quality.
This table shows the BA and xBA for left-handed hitters for the six seasons that xBA has been calculated. The third column is the difference between the two.
Important points based on the data in this chart:
• xBA for 2020 is close to previous seasons. Batters, both RH and LH, are behind pitchers at the start of the season. xBA increases after the first few weeks as contact quality improves. We see that every season and are again in 2020. The low Batting Average for LHH isn’t due to quality of contact not being as high as in the past. It’s almost exactly the same.
• In the first five seasons xBA was measured (2015-2019) we see a consistent pattern of Batting Average and Expected Batting Average being close to each other. Graphing it would produce another romantic walk. In each season from 2015-2019, BA has been slightly above xBA. That gap narrowed in recent years to almost zero.
• Something in 2020 has not only flipped the relationship between BA and xBA, but produced a gigantic gap. Keeping in mind that xBA is the quality of contact and BA is the outcome, what that data says is that left-handed batters are hitting the ball the same way, but their specific outcomes are way down — almost 20 points.
Is Defensive Alignment the Explanation?
Well-hit balls that traditionally have been hits but turn into outs are the defensive shift’s calling card.
We know the number of shifts has increased. The use of infield shifts against left-handed hitters has increased from 22% in 2017 to 53% in 2020 (2018: 30%, 2019: 42%). The Reds use an extra-infielder alignment in 66.5% of plate appearances vs. LHH. That’s 6th most in MLB.
But defensive shifts in 2020 involve more than sliding a third infielder over to the right side as in the past. If you’ve watched even a small amount of baseball this year, you’ve noticed that defenses are positioning a player out in short right field. That defender is aligned deep enough to catch line drives, but close enough so he can charge a ground ball and still make a play at 1B.
What’s new in defensive alignment in 2020 is the prevalence of extra-deep infielders on the right side.
This graphic shows the evolution of infield positioning (for LHH, shift on, no one out, Baseball Savant).
The two black arrows highlight that the 2B (or one of the infielders) is playing deeper now. In 2016, shifts rarely involved moving an infielder out there. In 2019, not quite half the shifts included the extra-deep fielder. Now in 2020, the extra-deep fielder has become the standard.
The extra-deep infielder is designed to thwart ground balls and line drives. Let’s look at each category and see what’s happening.
Ground Balls From 2015-2017, Batting Average and xBatting Average on ground balls were about the same as each other. But as defenses made greater use of three infielders on the right side, a small gap (5-8 points) opened up. The shift showed a modest effect. But in 2020, with infielders stationed out in right field, the gap between BA and xBA for ground balls has soared (60 points). Based on the way baseball has operated in the past five years, left-handed batters should be hitting .261 on ground balls, this year they are hitting only .201.
Line Drives Into The Shift Line drives are the best kind of batted balls. They have more than double the probability of turning into a hit than do ground balls. For years, the 3-across infield shifts didn’t affect line drives because the balls flew over the infielders’ heads. But extra-deep infielders put line drives into play.
These are the numbers for Batting Averages on line drives for left-handed hitters into the shift. In effect, they compare the effectiveness of the shift season-to-season. As more left-handed shifts involve an extra-deep infielder, Batting Average has declined relative to xBA by more than 30 points.
Demonstration
It’s easier to understand what’s going on when you see it happen in a game. Here are three examples of the extra-deep infielder taking away a base hit.
These are simple to find. The first two come from back-to-back innings in Friday night’s game, with the Reds benefitting. Here, Freddy Galvis is playing the extra-deep infield position and robs Matt Carpenter of a line-drive hit in the 2nd inning.
The second example is from the next inning. Galvis ranges far to left to field a ground ball and throw the runner out at first.
Those two balls have been hits for 100 years. But they aren’t now.
Finally, here’s an example not from the Reds but a play you may have seen on a highlight reel.
The player making that catch in the RF corner is Manny Machado. He is the Padres THIRD BASEMAN who was playing their deep 2B.
Now, Back to the Reds
The brutal facts If you look at the data for the Reds left-handed hitters, the ones who are common to 2019 and 2020 (Votto, VanMeter, Barnhart, Winker, Galvis as LH) or those who are new with a large role in 2020 (Akiyama and Moustakas), you’ll find these astonishing facts:
- The percent of pitches Reds LHH have seen when the defense is playing a shift has increased from 35% in 2019 to 65% in 2020
- The quality of contact (xBA) from Reds lefties has been good at .263
- Reds lefties have lost 40 points in Batting Average (BA) relative to their quality of contact (xBA)
So if you’re looking for explanations for the Reds weak offense Start here. The impact on LH batters from the double-whammy of seeing almost twice as many pitches into the shift and the new emphasis on extra-deep infielder in 2020 is enormous. Reds LHH in particular have been significant and frequent victims. Joey Votto’s quality of contact (xBA) against the shift should have produced a Batting Average of .271, which is good. But his BA against shifts is only .197. That’s a gap of more than 70 points. Votto had no shift gap in 2019. Josh VanMeter has similar 2020 shift numbers to Votto (even a little worse), and Jesse Winker’s gap is about half of Votto’s, which is still big.
What about the Reds right-handed hitters? They are facing more shifts as well. Their pitches-with-shift percent is up from 11% (2019) to 25% (2020). But those shifts are far less effective because using an extra-deep IF doesn’t work against RHH. Unlike one on the right side, an extra-deep infielder on the left side doesn’t have time to throw out the batter on a ground ball. So shifts against RHH are mostly three guys straight across.
The data shows the shift isn’t hurting Reds RHH. But when you poke around those numbers you discover the amazing amount of bad luck Reds right-handed hitters have suffered in 2020. By quality of contact, Reds RHH have hit .251 (xBA) which is right at league average. But their actual Batting Average is only .206. That’s a staggering loss of 45 points. That’s the highest BA-xBA gap in MLB; only a couple teams are close. The gap for Reds RHH is there with shifts and standard defense.
A Quick Thought on the Future of Defense: The Super Infielder As the extra-deep infielder strategy becomes central and its benefits clear, teams will search out and pay a premium for a specific kind of player. The extra-deep infielder has to be versatile, agile, have a strong arm and be exceptional at charging a ground ball to make a play at first. For most teams, the shortstop will become a super infielder on both sides of second base. Freddy Galvis often plays the extra-deep infielder for the Reds and he’s ideal for it. Galvis is quick and agile, and metrics show that charging ground balls has been his strength in the past.
Summary
The culprit in the Reds offensive woes is Batting Average. Remember, the Reds are #6 in power and #3 in walks. But they’re not seeing line drives and ground balls falling in for hits. We’ve discovered two things: (1) Reds LHH are being owned by the newish extra-deep infielder, and (2) Reds RHH have been struck by bad luck on balls in play.
Those factors don’t explain everything wrong with the Reds offense, but their magnitude on Batting Average is gigantic.
As a fan, complaining about defensive shifts and bad luck may not be as gratifying as pointing blame at David Bell or Dick Williams. But unlike fictional yarns spun about “urgency” or “feel” these are real, grounded in data, on-the-field explanations for what’s going on.
[Featured image: https://twitter.com/Reds/status/1136683194487623680]
Wow, Steve. One of my favorite posts to date (and that’s a high bar here). I’m curious: have you looked deep enough into xBA to know how accurate it is? You note the ‘too many in the middle’ comment about quality of contact. Is xBA overvaluing extra hard contact, by chance?
And I sure wish Galvis or Farmer had been postioned slightly deeper in right on the pop-up double that resulted in two runs for the Cards on Saturday night. It would have been a whole different ball game.
Thanks. The calculation of xBA is straightforward and objective. It assigns a probability for each batted ball based on the outcomes for similar batted balls. Because it’s just measuring batting average, there is no weighting for extra base hits. It wouldn’t be overvaluing extra hard contact, it would be assigning the average past outcome.
Thanks, Steve. I appreciate the analysis and response.
In this Covid-restricted year with ballparks less accessible for players who need extra work, it will be interesting to see how the hitters can work to adjust. As the pitchers tend to pound the inside of the plate against lefties, it is extra difficult for them to take the ball to the opposite field. Moving their stance farther from the plate would help, but seems like a big adjustment to execute. (It was interesting to see that Pete Rose called Yelich to recommend this change.) The other strategy for beating the shift is more loft on balls that are pulled. Again, that’s an adjustment in swing – albeit one that has already been happening for the last several years on a larger scale (for all hitters). Are you seeing any hitters, especially lefties, adjust well to this? Certainly some lefties are having great seasons, but that could be normal luck and sample size issues instead of real adjustments.
Steve, nice analysis there. So what do you think the answer is to this change in defensive shifting. Will it “work itself” out over time, or do major league hitters need to become much more savvy with opposite field hitting?
I should write a longer post that attempts to answer your question. But briefly: I don’t think it’s realistic to expect current major league players to change the way they hit. Too many of them have engrained habits. Plus, hitting the ball to the opposite field, or even up the middle, often robs them of home run power, so they don’t want to give that up. If the 2020 numbers continue with such a disparate effect on LHH, I think baseball should tweak the rules to prevent aggressive shifting. Absent that, teams could prioritize LH hitters who hit to all fields. Teams could use more RHH. That’s about it. The idea that batters can adapt and learn to beat the shift seems like the least plausible solution to me. Batters don’t aim the ball. Most of the time, they’re just trying to hit it and their mechanics, learned over a lifetime produce direction.
Great article. Thanks.
Great article, Steve, it confirms what I’ve been suspecting, especially when watching vanMeter. Votto used to be deadly with outside pitches, hitting them with power to left center field. It seems like he’s seeing fewer outside pitches. He’s also trying to pull more, which is playing right into the hands of the radical shifts. He did that for more power, but after a good start it’s not working. I don’t think he’s interested in a lauch angle adjustment.
I do recall a season where he broke out of a slump and went on a tear by moving a few inches away from the plate. I keep expecting to see some sort of adjustment.
I nosed around Votto’s data this morning. It’s wild and hard to know what to make of it. In July (which was just a week), he didn’t miss a fastball. If you remember, he had like one strikeout in the first week or so. But he was also hitting for pathetic exit velocity overall (he did have a memorable home run or two). But in August, his exit velocity is back up around his 2018-2019 numbers, which surprised me. His strikeout rate is climbing but still below his career #s. If I had to say something right now, it would be that he’s swinging earlier to compensate for age and that’s producing all the pulled balls that are getting snared in the shifts. He’ll never be what he was before, but how fast he drops now is an open question with mixed data. Always hoping for the best, though.
Why is it affecting the Reds more than other teams? All teams have LHH, but the Reds are disproportionately worse. Do we have more AB’s by LHH than other teams? Are our LHH supposed to be better/more productive than other teams?
This was an amazing read and analysis- I just want to know why the Reds are specifically so much worse than the rest of baseball that are also seeing these shifts. Thanks Steve for the great work!
Thanks for the kind words. I haven’t looked into why the Reds more than other teams, other than the Reds do have a lot of LH bats. It would be interesting to compare pull rates, line drive rates etc. for LHH by team. Will put that on the list of things to look up!
Great article and a very important one for baseball.
Nothing will be done about it by baseball, certainly not before the end of the year. It is detrimental to the game of baseball. They could require infielders to keep their feet on the dirt until the pitch is thrown? So what do the Reds do? Stack the lineup with RHH regardless of the pitcher? Definitely an argument for bringing up Aquino and Stevenson
Thanks. Yeah, there’s no obvious quick solution. I’d favor baseball passing rules to limit this kind of shift. If it burdens LHH substantially more than RHH, that seems unfair. I favor calling up Stephenson and making him the everyday catcher. Wrote about that a week or so ago. And I’d probably call up Aquino at this point and replace Jankowski or Ervin. But it’s hard to find playing time for Aquino. Winker and Castellanos play the corners. You could put Aquino at DH or in LF and have Winker DH, but then (1) does Davidson sit against LHP?, (2) when does Akiyama play once Senzel returns? It’s not that easy to find more than occasional AB for Aquino given the Reds current roster. And that’s still a case for calling him up. I’d try him instead of Ervin (although demoting Ervin runs the risk of exposing him to waivers because he is out of options).
Fictional? Wow. Too bad you dropped that at the end. It would have saved me a lot of reading. If you don’t think this team plays with a lack of passion, we’ve been watching two different teams. And I’ve seen pretty well every pitch. I like your analysis. It’s interesting and gives me things to think about. But this team needs someone to light a fire under it. If that’s fiction, I’ll stick with the fake stuff.
My experience watching sports teams of all kinds is that “fire” is a mostly product of success, not the other way around. Teams that are winning have chemistry. Teams that aren’t, don’t. The Reds have plenty of fire after they hit home runs. They’re just being worn down by the losing. I call it fiction because we — both me and you — are just speculating as amateur psychologists. The stuff in my article is data based on the on-field stuff.
By the way, how does the team have enough “fire” to be at the top in power, starting pitching, walks and solid in the bullpen? That’s the problem with the broad psychology or Blame David Bell For Everything theories. The Reds are struggling on the field in one area – Batting Average and are fine in the others. Does David Bell have a negative aura for Batting Average specifically?
Great article.
But in response to some of the arrogance of the tone in here, I have to laugh whenever “luck” is considered more of a factor to success (or failure) than the casual fan or broadcaster’s suggestion that the men picking or signing the players are partially to blame too. Or that somehow a team’s mental or emotional state is a “fictional” construct in relation to performance.
I have trouble reconciling how an analytic driven approach like this can so easily use luck as a cop out to try to explain what the data, as it is understood, does not reveal. Passion, urgency – whatever you want to call it – are equally plausible explanations to luck. Luck is empirical nonsense
That said, I agree with everything else, of course. I think it’s brilliant insight. But the frequent, smug digs at others is only petty and laughable when “bad luck” is supposedly a contributing factor.
How else would you explain that a team hits baseballs — measured and compared by radars and cameras down to centimeters — in a way that should produce a batting average of .250, based on balls hit exactly the same way since 2015, but instead produce an actual batting average of .200?
If the players lack passion and urgency, how are 6th in power and 3rd in walks? How are they at the top in starting pitching and in the middle on relief pitching? And again, how are they hitting the ball hard enough to deserve a .250 batting average?
You don’t know my tone is arrogance or smugness any more than I could judge your tone from “I have to laugh.”
This site isn’t a public street corner. Please keep your comments confined to baseball and the Reds, not the personal qualities of our writers or other commenters.
Sorry, first time on the site — C Trent tweeted this out and I thought it was interesting. I do think it’s great insight. Just found the shots taken at others a bit distracting. I love the observations of RH and LH vs. the shift. But chalking up the reds lack of success for RH hitters to luck sounded like a strange leap to me — just the same as saying the Reds lack urgency. Not a criticism of the writer, but an observation.
To answer your questions — is it possible we’ve reached an inflection point where we overweight exit velo, launch angle etc. and underweight a hitter’s ability to spray the ball given the new hyper-shifting? I’m speaking specifically to the idea that the Reds xba “quantifies” the bad luck RH hitters have encountered (and by extension the noted failures of LH hitters against the shift) compared to the less-shifting years in the even recent past. Even for righties they’re facing the shift about 2x YOY, which is the same rate increase as lefties, coincidentally. And all of this is in the context of batting average, which was the premise — batting average is the issue for the Reds.
Nothing I’ve read or seen this year indicates that the traditional power, barrel % or exit velo metrics are tightly correlated with actual batting average. If anything, the teams with the lowest average exit velocity in the league (Rockies, Orioles, Marlins) have some of the best batting averages (4, 5, and 11, respectively). Is it possible that the Reds, players and management, are clinging to the idea that going up there and just pounding the ball, regardless of shift, is the optimal approach? If the “north stars” guiding the team’s analytic strategies are off, we’ll always be lost.
Are teams more adept at trying to “beat” the shift, better at getting on base? Probably. Does that correlate to W/L? Tenuously?
My point — I don’t think there is a clear answer. I reject the notion that “luck” is the solution, however. If it is, then I’m back to saying the Reds need a facial hair policy. I look forward to checking in on the blog in the future and I’ll keep my comments to myself.
Since xBA is based upon actual results, and exit Gemini’s directly correlates, there is a direct correlation from exit velo to batting average.
This is really nice work.
Balance it out between the RHH and the LHH and have them run bases in opposite order every other night.
What a great article. Yes I caught the rather backhanded dig at the Bell detractors, for which I disagree with you. Shift or no shift, Bell’s team is not meeting standards, and all other teams must deal with the shift, so no excuses there. Bell is a BAD manager, and has no previous experience that suggested that he was a good manager. To the point of the article, and your comment above about the answer. You are spot on. You can’t solve this problem by telling players to adjust. Not everyone is Tony Gwynn, and bunting for a base hit is extremely hard for the average player. Baseball is so worried about speed of the game, but their biggest problem in the game right now is the shift. We are now watching a K, BB, or HR, about 40% of the time, and that’s just boring baseball. The shift is destroying the game. Two fielders should have to be on each side of the 2nd base bag all of the time, and must be in the dirt or the infield grass. Simple solution. Thanks for the article.
Great insight for sure and as a lifelong Reds fan who actually had an opportunity to play at the next level a long time ago, I feel like I am somewhat qualified to “chime in” on the comments about luck…we’ve always said that “stats don’t lie..” and baseball is for sure a game of stats. But I can attest that they don’t always tell the complete story of chemistry or momentum and yes, pure luck. I’ve been on teams that had great individual players but couldn’t get past .500 baseball and I’ve been on teams that always found a way to get it done by playing for each other and sacrificing personal stats and making great plays when it counted the most. This team has a proclivity for self destruction which seems to be more of a trend than just bad luck can account for…which begs the ultimate question… do you sometimes need to shake things up regardless of who’s to blame? I tend to shy away from the “blame the manager” excuse, especially for the pro’s…you’re getting paid to be the best at what you do and you’ve done this your whole life up to this point…no manager can go out and hit, catch or throw for you..not to mention go halfway on a line drive to right Freddy Galvis for the love of all things Holy! How many times can you ground into a double play or have RISP with less than 2 outs and consistently come away with nothing..?? And this has been going on for years now. We always bitched that we never had top starting pitching like the Cardinals, Cubs or Yankees and now that we do, we can’t move a guy over like it’s been done since Abner started this mess all those years ago? I love stats, discussion and all manner of theories…sometimes a team is just snakebit for a while. Let’s see what the Cubs and Redsox would say about that over the course of the last 100 years, the last decade notwithstanding
Keep up the great analysis