A short while ago, Joe Posnanski discovered F.C. Lane. No, that’s not right - Joe Posnanski didn’t discover anybody. Joe Posnanski learned about F.C. Lane after reading a post at FanGraphs, and then Joe Posnanski wrote about F.C. Lane at considerable length, like Joe Posnanski usually does.
Harry Wright, And Baseball’s Glacial Pace Of Progress
Very smart people have been thinking very smart things about baseball for a very long time. Baseball is starting to catch up.
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Who was F.C. Lane? F.C. Lane was a lot of things, but for a time, he was a baseball writer. And he wasn’t just your ordinary baseball writer; he was an innovative baseball writer, well ahead of his time. In 1916-1917, Lane wrote a number of articles on why batting average isn’t a very good statistic, and on a possible improvement. In a way, he was trying to create wOBA. Writes Posnanski:
He made the point that if someone has a 50-cent piece, a quarter, three dimes, four nickels and three pennies, we would say he has $1.28 and NOT that he has 12 coins.
Lane and the people at Baseball Magazine had watched and carefully compiled the records of 1,000 hits in games during the 1916 season played by every team (and including one World Series game). “Our sole object,” he wrote, “was to find the exact value of a single, a double, a triple and a home run.”
Terrific stuff. Terrific, sensible, eerily accurate stuff, as it turns out. Nobody really cared. Some people probably cared, but not enough people cared, and batting average remained a - the? - dominant statistic for decades and decades. Lane exposed the flaws in batting average, and for all I know there were people before him who did the same thing, but it didn’t catch on, and only more recently have people started looking harder at the other numbers. The more meaningful numbers.
Okay. So, Tuesday evening, I was browsing around, which is a big part of my job description. I have my usual haunts and my unusual haunts, and my browsing eventually led me to this page on MLB.com. Title:
Happy 177th birthday to a great baseball innovator
Caption:
Hall of Famer Harry Wright invented defensive shifts, so Mark Teixeira can thank him for that .224 average from the left side last year.
Without delving too deep into Wright’s history, yeah. Wright might not have been the first person to move defensive players around according to the hitter, but he’s at least the person who gets credit for that. It’s a stroke of moderate genius. Different hitters will hit the ball differently. Why not play them differently, to maximize the efficiency of the defense?
That comes from the final third of the 19th Century. Thinking about all this reminds me of an article from Mel Antonen at Sports Illustrated. An article published on April 19, 2011. Excerpt:
The Brewers use spray charts to set their defense, and in many cases, that means defensive shifts that put infielders in odd places. It's common for most teams to position three infielders on the right side to play defense against power-hitting lefties such as David Ortiz, Adam Dunn or Jim Thome.
But thanks to information in spray charts that indicate where a batter is likely to hit a ground ball, the Brewers are taking infield shifts to a different level, sometimes to the extreme. For example, the Brewers' infield shifted against the Nationals' right-handed batters Jayson Werth, Michael Morse, rookie catcher Wilson Ramos and Rick Ankiel, a lefty.
Under Ron Roenicke, the Brewers very frequently shifted their infielders around based on where the coaches expected the hitters to hit the ball. This was notable, because it was weird.
From another article, titled Shifty playoff teams overload against lefty bats, which is a title you have to read very carefully, we get this excerpt:
But now, the computer age has produced all sorts of metrics to go with spray charts and advance scouting, showing exactly where batters hit the ball against particular pitches, in specific zones, on certain counts.
Clubs that embrace the data use it to set their defense -- and it seems there’s more shifting going on than ever before.
That article was published on October 7, 2011. During last year’s playoffs, in other words.
The concept of shifting is nothing new. Obviously. Neither is the act of shifting anything new. For a long time, a number of teams would shift against certain power-hitting lefties. But there was a time before teams shifted - a long time - and since they started, they haven’t shifted enough.
No, teams haven’t always had access to detailed spray charts. There’s more information now than ever before, leading to greater, faster change than ever before. But even before this flood of data...it’s so intuitive that hitters usually pull their ground balls. Why not play them to pull their ground balls?
I can’t understand why more teams didn’t shift in the olden days. I absolutely can’t understand why every team doesn’t have a series of shifts today. Shifting, as long as you’re shifting properly, makes the defense better, which makes the team better. No, it won’t always work - sometimes a ball will find a hole you opened up on purpose. But it’s all about the odds, and the odds are in favor of the team that moves players around. With good shifting, a team will turn more hits into outs than outs into hits.
I get the resistance to change thing, kind of. We’re all resistant to change. And with something like advanced offensive statistics, there’s a lot of math involved, and it’s sort of theoretical. We can’t prove run values (I think). But the shifting blows my mind. Customize your defense for each hitter, and as long as you have some idea what you’re doing, you’ll be better because of it. It’s a very intuitive thing. It’s easy to implement. How is this seemingly only now catching on?
A lot of people have criticized baseball for its slow adoption of instant replay. I have criticized baseball for its slow adoption of instant replay. F.C. Lane and Harry Wright would chuckle at our impatience. Baseball is making slow progress today, and the fastest progress it’s ever made.
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