No, Jay Bruce Is Not a Martyr

The shift harmed Jay Bruce's career. That's not a bad thing.

In Sports Illustrated this week, Tom Verducci has a new column on Jay Bruce and the shift, on the occasion of Bruce’s retirement. Bruce, he argues, is just the latest example of how the shift is harming hitters, and why MLB needs to take action. “Seven years of evidence is enough,” he writes. “The shift is harming baseball and must go. The career of Jay Bruce — what it was and what it could have been — is the canary in the coal mine. It is too late for Bruce, but not for the next generation of hitters — and fans.”

Here’s the problem: Verducci never really makes an argument about why MLB should ban the shift. What he does is different: he lists some things that have happened, then says “that’s why MLB should ban the shift.” What he doesn’t do, crucially, is prove that the premises actually support the conclusion. 

What he’s done is sort of like saying “Mike Trout is from New Jersey; therefore, he’s the best player in the majors.” Is Mike Trout from New Jersey? Absolutely. Is he the best player in the majors? Maybe. Do those two things have anything to do with each other? Probably not. They might, I suppose, but if you want to argue that they do, you have to at least make the argument.

Here’s a point-by-point look at Verducci’s column.

Jay Bruce retired Sunday after a 14-year career. His problem was not when his career ended but when it began. As a left-handed pull hitter without much speed, Bruce came along at the wrong time. If you want an example of how the growth of defensive shifts has harmed careers, Bruce is as blatant an example as any.

The problem with this argument — that “the growth of defensive shifts has harmed careers” — is that it completely ignores the other side of the equation. In terms of “career harm,” baseball is a zero-sum game. If the shift cost Jay Bruce playing time, it gave more playing time to a different player, one who was a more effective hitter against the shift. Harm to Jay Bruce’s career was also a boon to the pitchers who faced him. The shift has harmed some careers, but helped others. So the entire premise of Verducci’s column rests on the assumption that for some reason, harm to the careers of left-handed pull hitters without much speed like Jay Bruce is a bigger issue than harm — or help — to the careers of anyone else.

Since 2015, the use of shifts has more than tripled, from 9.6% of all pitches to 32.1% this year. Over that time, left-handed hitters such as Bruce, Brian McCann, Anthony Rizzo, Matt Carpenter and Kyle Seager have seen their careers turn for the worse because of the shifts they face in which one or two infielders position themselves on the outfield grass to their pull side.

Shift use has exploded because shifts accomplish their intended task—they depress offense. They are especially punitive to left-handed hitters who don’t run well.

Again: Verducci doesn’t consider the benefits the shift has had for other players who can actually beat the shift, and pitchers who have pitched against left-handed pull hitters. The entire premise of these two paragraphs rests on the assumption that the only harm that matters is harm to hitters like Jay Bruce. He’s basically saying “the shift made Jay Bruce worse; therefore, the shift is bad.” But that’s no more self-evidently true than “Mike Trout is from New Jersey; therefore, he’s the best player in MLB.”

Bruce lost 107 points off his pull-side batting average and 92 points on his batting average on balls in play to that side. If Bruce had been able to maintain the same pull-side hitting in the second half of his career as he did in the first half, he would have had another 59 hits.

“The shift made Jay Bruce worse; therefore, the shift is bad.”

Maybe Bruce just declined quickly, the way some players do. Even if you grant that premise, there is no doubt the shift worsened his decline. Since 2015, the major league batting average on balls in play is .298. But when Bruce faced a shift, he saw his BABIP drop 82 points below league average. Only Albert Pujols had a worse shift-affected BABIP than Bruce did over these seven seasons.

“The shift made Jay Bruce worse; therefore, the shift is bad.”

Hard-hit outs are another way to show how the shift hurt Bruce. The average major leaguer hits .544 when he hits a ball 100 mph or greater. Bruce hit 83 points worse than average when he absolutely smoked a pitch—the fourth unluckiest such average.

“The shift made Jay Bruce worse; therefore, the shift is bad.”

It’s not just the extreme hard-hit balls that shifts have turned from hits into outs. It’s the deep ground balls or those one-hop bullets to the second baseman who is flexed into short right field. If we count how many times a hitter was put out by an infielder from 135 feet or more away from home plate (essentially, beyond the infield dirt), Bruce shows up again as one of the hitters most harmed.

All six hitters who have been put out the most on these “deep infield” outs are left-handed, don’t run well and are former All-Stars—just not recently. The preponderance of shifts has helped keep them out at least the past three All-Star Games.

“The shift made Jay Bruce worse; therefore, the shift is bad.”

Bruce pulled the baseball 45.1% of the time in his career. That’s fewer than left-handed hitters such as Tino Martinez (53.6%), Rafael Palmeiro (53.5%), Robin Ventura (50.9%), Fred McGriff (50.5%) and Garrett Anderson (49.7%). But all of them finished their careers before shifts became so popular. Ventura averaged 37.4 pull-side singles every 162 games; Bruce averaged 27.8.

MLB will experiment this year in the minors with two versions of curtailing the shift: keeping infielders on the dirt, and then in the second half of the season possibly banning three infielders on one side of second base.

Meanwhile, evidence that the shift is harming careers and the entertainment value of the game continues to mount. Entering this week, the major league batting average was .233, the third-lowest April batting average in the 102 years of the live ball era (1943, 1968). Batting average on balls in play is down to .286, the lowest in 29 years. Hits are at an all-time low. Strikeouts are at an all-time high.

Here, Verducci finally makes an argument that tries to connect “the shift made hitters like Jay Bruce worse” to “therefore, the shift is bad.” He ties his argument to “entertainment value.” The shift is bad, he argues, because it has made hitters like Jay Bruce worse, and that has made baseball less entertaining.

The conclusion that baseball’s entertainment value has been harmed is based on four premises:

• Entering this week, the major league batting average was .233, the third-lowest April batting average in the 102 years of the live ball era (1943, 1968).

• Batting average on balls in play is down to .286, the lowest in 29 years.

• Hits are at an all-time low.

• Strikeouts are at an all-time high.

The first premise doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the shift. As Verducci notes himself, strikeouts are at an all-time high; couldn’t that be the cause of the low league-wide batting average? Couldn’t it also have something to do with the lowest-in-29-years BABIP, which itself might be partially or wholly shift-independent? Isn’t it possible that the shift has nothing to do with it?

The second premise is sort of self-defeating: if league-wide BABIP is at a 29-year-low, should we chalk it up to the shift or random variation? It’s not like there was a huge surge in shifts in 1992, which led to the previous league-wide BABIP low, and likewise, there was lots of shifting in 2020 and 2019 and 2018, but they don’t seem to have affected BABIP as much as shifting in 2021 has. Maybe a single month of BABIP just doesn’t mean that much. 

The third premise probably has something to do with the shift, but undoubtedly also has to do with the fact that, as we see one line later, strikeouts are at an all-time high, and there’s little to no evidence that that’s an effect of the shift. The fourth premise, likewise, doesn’t have anything to do with the shift; it’s just a thing that happened.

There’s also the separate fact that “fewer hits and more strikeouts are less entertaining” isn’t automatically true. As far as I could tell, Jacob deGrom’s complete-game, two-hit, fifteen-strikeout shutout last week was just about as entertaining as baseball gets. So Verducci’s argument is that the shift is reducing offense, and that’s making baseball less entertaining, except A) it’s not that clear that the shift is reducing offense any more than it usually does, and B) even if it was, it’s not obvious that that makes the game less entertaining. And there’s yet another issue that Verducci doesn’t address: fairness and integrity of the game. Even if the shift DID destroy offensive careers, and that DID destroy the entertainment value of baseball, would it be fair for MLB to respond by telling teams “you’re not allowed to play what everyone knows is the most effective version of defense, because hitters aren’t good enough to hit against it”? 

The column continues: 

The percentage of at bats in which the ball is not put in play (home runs, walks, strikeouts, hit batters) is up to 38%. And in the 62% of at-bats when a hitter manages to put a ball into play, the shift is taking away hits and affecting the careers of players like Bruce.

The first sentence has nothing to do with the shift. The second sentence is a return to “the shift made Jay Bruce worse; therefore, the shift is bad.”

Seven years of evidence is enough. The shift is harming baseball and must go. The career of Jay Bruce—what it was and what it could have been—is the canary in the coal mine. It is too late for Bruce, but not for the next generation of hitters—and fans.

“The shift is harming baseball.” Verducci hasn’t proven that; he’s proven that the shift is harming Jay Bruce. Who is it helping? The pitchers who face him. The teams that know how to shift most effectively. Hitters who can actually hit to all fields. The shift has obviously helped teams play defense: if it hadn’t, it wouldn’t have hurt Jay Bruce’s offense so much. If the shift hadn’t helped other players, better hitters than Jay Bruce, maybe Bruce himself would still have a job. But Verducci doesn’t consider any of this, and that’s why his column is so hard to take seriously: he completely ignores the fact that baseball is far, far more than just Jay Bruce.