1. There are hardly any left-handed batters in this league, so we’re shifting mostly against righties. Lefty shifts are so much easier—we’re moving for every left-hander in the league at this point, except for one guy, Scott David of the Pittsburg Diamonds, who seems immune to our fancy defenses. The philosophical premise of the shift is that positions are irrelevant, that behind the pitcher are just seven guys with seven gloves trying to catch the ball and standing wherever makes that outcome most likely. But one of those seven does have a nonnegotiable role, covering first base. This one tether is a huge inconvenience against right-handers. Even so, we do shift against righties. A lot.
2. At this level, errors happen. We’re all used to them, and we’re all happy to blame the lousy infield grass (which gets worse throughout the year). But when a second baseman is standing forty feet over from his normal position and makes an error, it’s easy for everybody to blame the error on his being unaccustomed to that angle, or that throw, which by extension means blaming us. Or at least it’s easy for me to assume they’re blaming us.
3. A lot of dudes at this level just aren’t good enough to be pull hitters. They want to be: They swing like pull hitters and have the approach of pull hitters, but against good fastballs they’re just slow. It’s like playing poker against somebody who is just learning the rules: They’re too unpredictable to feel comfortable against.
4. The big one: Mochizuki, our veteran second baseman/shortstop, who is supposed to be guiding the rest of the infielders, can’t remember the plans we deliver to him before the game. So we yell out to him and wave our arms at him, which increasingly seems to peeve him—partly my fault, I fear, because of the time that I (with absolutely no feel) yelled “Moch!” just as the pitcher was delivering his pitch. He’s nice as hell about it and acts really into the concept of the shifts, but when he’s out on the field he simply begins to ignore us. We’re thwarted by simple churlishness.
The greatest feeling isn’t when a shift works perfectly—when a guy grounds one right at the shortstop pulled way over into the hole, or lines one right at the second baseman standing behind the bag. The greatest is when a shifted-against guy hits one where we’re most exposed—a right-hander grounds to the right side, or even lines one—but our lone remaining defender is there. When we were nervous about the shift, we focused on that big empty space on the underdefended side of the infield. But once we implemented it, we realized things could go totally wrong and still work out totally right. Once, a right-hander crushed a line drive between where the first and second basemen usually play. It’s a hit a hundred times out of a hundred in a normal alignment, but it went right into first baseman Kristian Gayday’s glove. We didn’t exactly want Gayday there—if we could have, he’d have been fifty feet farther from the line—but we needed him there to cover the bag. That limitation forced him to stand exactly where the ball went. It was a total accident, and we looked so smart. It’s reassuring to be reminded that, yes, even our dumb plans have some margin for error.
* * *
But back to the unshiftable one, Scott David. The Pittsburg second baseman arrived midseason from a Canadian circuit called the Intercounty Baseball League, where he was hitting .435/.500/.652. His numbers took a hit coming to our league, but .435 can take a lot of hits before it stops being awesome, and David is contending for our league’s batting title. (He is, in fact, the only thing between Matt Chavez and a Triple Crown.) We’re determined to find something that we can offer our pitchers heading into a series against the Diamonds, but David hits everything, everywhere. For two hours on Ben’s hardwood living-room floor, I parse David’s results finer and finer, hoping to find something I can give to the team.
But it’s only when Ben and I start joking about outlandish solutions that we realize Scott David is exactly the sort of hitter they invented the five-man infield for. Except, nobody has invented the five-man infield. We’re inventing it, right now. And he’s the hitter we’re inventing it for.
Up to now, we’ve been stealing from major league teams, trying to bring the twentieth-century world of indy ball into the twenty-first. This is the first time we’re going to try something that nobody does. There are two steps to this: We have to make the case to our team (manager, fielders, pitchers) that this makes sense; and we have to figure out the right way to do it. If we get those two done, we go to step three: observing how David handles it and adjusting as needed.
The case is easy enough to make, on paper. David is a left-handed batter, and he’ll be facing our right-handed pitchers. Against right-handed pitchers, he has a .440 batting average when he hits a ground ball. That’s the highest success rate on his team, more than double the league’s average. He also hits ground balls more frequently than anybody on his team, and he sprays those ground balls all over the field, so we can’t possibly defend every hole. Further, his signature hit is a shallow grounder that the shortstop or third baseman charges but can’t transfer fast enough to beat him to first. If we had five men in the infield, we’d plug more of those infield holes, while also allowing everybody to play a couple of steps in and field his choppers more quickly.
Ground balls are only part of it, though. He’s hitting .923 on line drives, about half of which are low enough that an infielder could snag them if properly positioned. (They also follow no directional tendency.) Meanwhile—our closing argument, the truly captivating spray chart: He never pulls fly balls. Not rarely. Never. He has hit seven fly balls all year: four to straightaway left field, two to shallow left-center, and one pop-up to deep shortstop.
Clearly, playing a five-man infield—with the ambition of cutting off singles and turning them into outs—will leave us vulnerable to doubles and triples. But turning a single into an out is far more important—about 2.5 times more important—than letting a single turn into a double; even the difference between a single and a triple is smaller, on average, than the change from a single to an out. And in certain situations, the benefits of the out are even greater. For instance, runners on second and third with two outs: A single does very nearly as much damage as a triple does, while an out ends the inning, saves the game, changes the world. So we make up some numbers:
a. If Scott David hits 55 percent grounders, and converts 44 percent of those grounders to hits (i.e., he hits .440 on grounders), and
b. if he hits 30 percent line drives at a .900 batting average, and
c. if he hits 15 percent fly balls at a .286 batting average,
and we shift so that he now hits .300 on grounders, .800 on line drives, and .400 on fly balls, then over the course of 100 batted balls we’ll turn about nine hits into outs. Even assuming all those nine hits would have been singles, he would have to turn nearly thirty singles into doubles to make up the difference in value. Basically, every hit would have to be a double.
This vastly oversimplifies things, of course. For one thing, we wouldn’t put the shift on in situations where a double or triple is especially harmful (relative to a single), such as with two outs and a runner on first. This means that our average “values” of singles, doubles, and outs are skewed against us. For another, some of those doubles might come from “outs,” if David proves capable of hitting routine cans of corn to right field that suddenly become extra bases. But we’ve found that vastly oversimplifying things is the best way to make these cases. Most of our players aren’t like the commenters on our articles, picking apart our data and arguments. Thank goodness.
Actually, they also don’t necessarily read or care about the arguments at all, which is the problem: A good case on paper promises nothing with our team. We need them to want to be on our side. We need them to feel like we’ve been listening to them all year, that we don’t come at them with bullshit, that we’re not trying to make them guinea pigs, and that whatever we’re suggesting isn’t some sort of slippery slope that leads to extra practice tomorrow morning. Maybe we just need them to feel like this is all fun.
Which makes this a test not just
of our data but also of our labor this whole season. We’re reminding them, with our spray charts, that we have been working as hard as they have. We’re showing them, in the manner in which we approach them, that we’re always learning and listening to their concerns. We’re also underscoring, by the outrageousness of our idea, that we aren’t afraid; that we have authority, and that we’re using it now. We promised way back in spring training that we were going to go slow, because we believe not just in using data but also in using data right; our patience was our pledge, and it was the proof that we were true to our principles. Now here we are, two months in, and if you can’t trust us today then you’re really telling us that we will never have a place on your team. And we do have a place on your team. We didn’t sit in the bullpen all those hours listening to you describe your dicks for nothing.
Before the first game of the series, I gather the whole team in the dugout to discuss the five-man infield we’re going to deploy against Scott David. Nervous to speak for the first time since spring, I explain it all in the span of one hundred seconds. Connor Jones, our new right fielder who’s making his first start as a Stomper, will run in to play a deep second base; I texted him earlier in the day to advise that he take grounders in batting practice, and I hope he listened. The second baseman, Gered Mochizuki, will play right up the middle; new shortstop Peter Bowles and third baseman Yuki Yasuda will pinch in a few steps so they can charge the slow rollers, and first baseman Kristian Gayday will play on the line but a bit deeper than usual so nothing gets past him. Center fielder Matt Hibbert will pull way over into the right-center-field gap; anything that gets over Jones or Gayday will be his to chase down. Left fielder Mark Hurley, meanwhile, won’t move at all. He’s going to be straight away, where David tends to hit fly balls. To David, it’s going to look as if right field—where he never hits fly balls—is the wide open space, but really we’re far more worried that he’ll go to dead center, where the 435 feet between home plate and the fence give him a potential inside-the-park home run on any well-struck fly ball. “If he does that,” I say, “we’ll adjust. Okay. Okay?”
It’s silent for a second, and then Moch says, “Fuck yeah, awesome. Let’s fuckin’ do it.”
* * *
We don’t put the shift on in the first inning—we want to give our pitcher, Gregory Paulino, a chance to get settled in—and David grounds a single past our shortstop for a hit that an extra infielder might have prevented. When he bats in the fourth, I step outside the dugout and wave at Connor Jones. Everyone on the field moves, except Hurley.
David brushes the dirt in the batter’s box smooth, then looks toward his dugout, as if somebody is saying something to him. He steps out and turns to survey the field, freezing for a moment when he looks to the right side. He grimaces, spits, then digs into the box. The first pitch he sees is a fastball, just below the knees, on the inside part of the plate. It’s supposed to be on the outer half, but targets are only suggestions at this level. David flies open, a dead-pull swing, his belt buckle pointing at the vacant right field as his arms extend to wrap around the inside pitch. He hits it square and drives a low line drive toward right field. Connor Jones takes a step and dives to his right—and misses it by inches. Matt Hibbert jogs in to field the ball. About thirty feet down the line, David flips his bat at least twenty feet in the air and screams “Yargh!” as he passes our dugout. The five-man infield didn’t work. It also didn’t hurt, and it actually makes our case stronger: That’s exactly the sort of ball that we’re defending against, a certain base hit that, with a fifth man closing holes, we very nearly turned into an out. Somebody pats my shoulder, recognition that the plan “worked.”
We keep working at it. The next at-bat, David grounds one right down the first-base line; Gayday, hugging the line and playing deep, doesn’t even have to move to field it. “Now flip the bat!” I say, loud enough to sound like I want David to hear me as he jogs it out, though not loud enough that he actually will. In his third and final at-bat into the shift, he taps a grounder up the middle, and Paulino tips it with his glove, slowing it down even more. Mochizuki is playing right behind Paulino, in perfect position to make the play. He fields it so casually, though, that David beats the throw. Everybody on the team is sick of Mochizuki’s lack of effort on plays like this one, so this one gets me another backslap. In four plate appearances today, David hit three grounders and a low line drive inches away from our repositioned infield.
He also went 3-for-4.
But we consider this a huge success. With everybody watching David’s approach closely, he did exactly what we said he would do. We put the same shift on the next day with Sean Conroy, the league’s most extreme ground-ball pitcher, on the mound. David grounds right to the shortstop in his first at-bat, then back to Conroy in his second, then lines one to right-center field, where Matt Hibbert is playing. A single streak of sunlight through the trees to the west of Arnold Field turns this routine play into a difficult one, and it deflects off Hibbert’s glove. “You have to feel good about this,” I tell Theo. “David is trying to pull the ball. He’s getting out of his natural swing. And he’s hitting balls more or less right at defenders. That’s six times he has put the ball in play with that five-man infield, and he has basically hit it at fielders all six times.”
David goes 1-for-3 in the next game, then 0-for-3, then sits out the next two games he plays against us. He’s hurt, we hear, and we have no real reason to doubt it. But he’s chasing a batting title, and I flatter myself by believing that he’s avoiding our defense. He went 4-for-12 against the shift, all singles, and at least two (and maybe three) of those hits were due to our fielders’ awkwardness at their new “positions.” We were getting better at it. David—who admitted to one of our catchers that it bugged him to see the defense like that, and that he was trying like hell to hit the open expanses in the outfield—was not. “Hit it in the air one goddamn time,” one of his teammates groaned in exasperation, after watching him ground out again.
13
SANDS OF TIME
There’s a sentiment I’ve grown used to expressing, a lame little cop-out that cushions the blow when I have to tell a hopeful player that the Stompers don’t have room on the roster. “There’s a ton of turnover at this level, so stay in touch,” I say, or, “Guys get signed all the time, so we’ll let you know if we have a need,” or, “Not right now, but things can change overnight.” The sentiment isn’t always sincere—in some cases, I know there’s no way we’ll sign the player I’m talking to unless our whole roster gets raptured—but from what I’ve been told, the statement is technically true. Based on the Stompers’ long list of transactions in 2014, Theo and Tim have warned us since spring training that players leave with almost no notice, that we shouldn’t get too attached, that we can’t count on keeping anyone who impresses enough to attract attention from higher-level leagues. But for the first two-thirds of the season, the only departures we’ve had to deal with were players we weren’t sorry to see go.
In the Stompers’ clubhouse, there’s a memorial wall where the players post the names and numbers of their former teammates. At the top, there’s a piece of tape on which someone has written “RIP” in big blue letters, the top of an adhesive headstone. When we clinched the first half, there were only three names beneath. The first was Danny Martinez, who started the season with the Stompers as infield insurance on the inactive list but never got into a game. His tape strip, like the littlest angel’s crooked halo, is the saddest of all: It says “XX” next to his name, since he never had a number. Below Martinez were Josh McCauley, a right-hander who pitched two games for the Stompers in June, and Sergio Miranda. The next day, Feh’s name became the fourth.
Anyone who’s been through a breakup knows that who does the dumping makes all the difference. Both sides are sad to see most relationships end, but the dumpee’s disappointment is compounded by the burden of being deemed disposable. For several weeks, Sam and Theo and I have done all the dumping,
excluding Andrew Parker, who one day in the dugout bragged about taking “at least four dumps a day.”
Just before the second half started, I got a reminder that most of our players see the Stompers as a stepping-stone to … something. With a southpaw starter on the mound for the Admirals, our lefty-hitting catcher Isaac Wenrich got the evening off. As I sat on a bench in the bullpen while Isaac waited to warm up a pitcher in the late innings, I heard him complain about being out of the lineup, telling everyone within earshot that he hoped to get out of the Pacific Association in the next couple of days, as teams in the Can-Am League, the Frontier League, and the American Association replaced their struggling starters or lost their stars to even more desirable leagues. For Isaac, serving time in his third Pacific Association season at twenty-five, a day off wasn’t a welcome respite; it was another sunset added to the end of his sentence, a day when he couldn’t do anything to show he deserved to be somewhere else. No one criticized his lack of team spirit, since almost every Stomper was thinking the same thing.
If pressed, I would have acknowledged on Opening Day that all our players had agreed to go out with us only to make better teams jealous. But as the season settled into a comfortable routine and we watched strangers become companions, their emotional states ebbing and flowing with our wins and losses, it was easy to convince ourselves that our players were happy to be here and that they were as invested as Sam and I in the Stompers’ success. Everyone we love eventually leaves us, if we don’t leave them first, but we’ve evolved to be good at forgetting painful facts. Hearing Isaac declare his ambition out loud was like discovering that your girlfriend has an active OkCupid profile or a malignant mole.
The Only Rule Is It Has to Work Page 28