Maybe players should follow Gleyber Torres and start using their feet to beat shifts
New York Yankees shortstop Gleyber Torres dives to home plate to score against the Houston Astros during the eighth inning of an MLB baseball game at Yankee Stadium on Thursday, May 6, 2021. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
Gleyber Torres scoring from first base on an infield single Thursday — without the help of an error and without even a throw home — was the rarest of plays. Few had seen that before, if ever.
But in this era of defensive shifts and distorted alignments, it should be happening a lot more. Or at least until teams are forced to reconsider analytics-driven strategies that leave bases uncovered and catchers engaging in losing footraces to the plate with speedy runners.
Major League Baseball can’t figure out what to do with the shift. The 21st- century front offices live by their data-crafted infield defenses, but they’ve also deleted too much entertainment value from the sport, prompting MLB to experiment with outlawing the shift in the lower minors this season.
The debate always seems to focus on whether the shift should be banned or not. But the bigger question remains: Why don’t teams simply pressure it out of existence?
We’ve given up on the most-targeted hitters bunting or slapping grounders through vacated positions in the infield. That would seem to be the most obvious angle of attack, but very few batters even bother to try. Not in this launch-angle generation.
The other option is to exploit those vulnerable areas by using their feet. That's what we witnessed Thursday from Torres, who capitalized on an Astros team that suffered a meltdown when the shift suddenly malfunctioned.
When shortstop Carlos Correa knocked down Aaron Hicks’ hard grounder up the middle, more on the second baseman’s side, nobody was anywhere near third and Torres never stopped running.
And when Torres noticed catcher Martin Maldonado frantically scrambling too late to get to third base, he rounded the bag and sprinted right past him for the plate, finishing with a headfirst slide. Third baseman Alex Bregman had the ball near second after Correa flipped it to him with Torres in full sprint mode, but Bregman had no one to throw the ball to.
Incredibly, pitcher Ryan Pressly watched the whole thing unfold from the mound, never budging toward an uncovered base. All he needed was a box of popcorn.
Afterward, Astros manager Dusty Baker was at a loss to explain the play, other than to say first baseman Yuli Gurriel should have scrambled to cover the plate.
"But with these unorthodox defenses — which I'm not crazy about — you're going to see plays like this," Baker said. "Especially from heads-up guys that can run."
Teams spend so much time and effort crunching data to come up with these defensive alignments in the name of run prevention, but it doesn’t seem as if they invest those same resources in devising countermeasures from an offensive standpoint.
The onus is put on individual players to notice how and where they are being defended — and then they have to be bold enough to jump on those chances, as Torres did. Because those opportunities are there. In plain sight. Every night.
"You're always looking to where you can gain a little bit of an advantage — to gain something on the margin from a baserunning standpoint and exploit something," Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. "Because with some shifts, it does put you into some vulnerable situations on certain balls.
‘As much as we work on defending from the shift and in those different positions, we also work on understanding where we're susceptible, so it requires everyone to be very heads-up. Typically, teams are aware when they're in a potential vulnerable situation, so you’ve got to be able to cover up those holes."
The shifts have become so exaggerated, however, that it doesn’t seem physically possible to get to some bases in some circumstances. On occasion, routine double-play grounders don't result in two outs because fielders are too far out of position.
A similar dynamic would seem to hold true if runners were put in motion more, which potentially could disrupt the shift by pulling defenders toward the bases instead.
But as long as these analytics-minded teams remain deathly afraid of running into outs, they'll continue to be too scared to trust the old-school baseball mantra of putting pressure on the defense. It just might work.
After the Yankees watched the Astros disintegrate Thursday during Gleyber’s Gallop, they discussed what they could do to tighten up themselves.
"The situation like [Thursday] doesn't present itself without a shift," the Yankees’ Corey Kluber said. "When it's something that's maybe not as normal for guys as it is nowadays to be in that kind of positioning, it’s an adjustment.
"But I think one of the things that I’ve been so impressed with here is how much attention to detail there is about every single part of the game and those discussions that go on in the dugout. We were talking about it [Friday] after the fact, as a group in the pitchers' meeting, just what our responsibilities are in that situation so that we are prepared if that does come about."
It’s going to happen again, and as teams continue to take notes on these breakdowns, maybe that awareness will push more players to try what Torres pulled off Thursday.
As Torres said, first-base coach Reggie Willits always tells him to check the defense when he arrives there, and in this case, the road map was clear once he noticed Bregman standing on second as part of the shift.
"I know Maldonado was trying to cover the base [third] and I remembered when I came into second base, I saw the pitcher staying on the mound," Torres said. "So in that moment I knew nobody was at home plate. I just kept running."
No one needs analytics for that.
Faith in numbers
There were no new positive COVID-19 tests among players and staff at the major-league level this past week for the first time in 2021 and only the fourth time since the monitoring program was put in place last season.
MLB is hoping that trend will remain steady now that 12 teams — or nearly half — are on track to reach the 85% threshold for Tier 1 personnel vaccination (five clubs already are there and seven should get there soon). As of Friday, MLB said 83% of all Tier 1 personnel, league-wide, were partially or fully vaccinated.
The Tier 1 designation refers to players, coaches and staff, so it’s not broken down specifically for members of a 26-man roster. But as education about the vaccine continues, MLB is optimistic that those numbers will rise as well.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
