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Jon's fantasy baseball pitchers to downgrade based on analysis of ground ball data and the shift. 2023 rule changes for the shift may affect certain pitchers.
One of the biggest things people are talking about and studying for the 2023 MLB season is what effect the changes to the rules about shifting will have on the game. I myself talked about that on the hitting side earlier this offseason, you can read that analysis here. Today, I want to get into the numbers on the pitching side of the ball.
This change will definitely have some effect on pitching statistics this year. We will not know for sure what that will be until we see plenty of games being played, but there is little doubt that we will see some extra hits because of this, and therefore some extra runs.
The biggest question for fantasy purposes is which pitchers this will affect and which pitchers it won't, and to what degree. Let's dive into the numbers to see if we can make some educated guesses.
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The Overall Data
Here is a table of data from 2018-2022 on batting averages allowed on ground balls, broken down by if there was a shift or not.
What we see is that overall, a ground ball has had about a 24.0% chance of going for a hit. When a shift was deployed, that drops almost five points.
In 2023, there will still be some opportunity to align the defense in a strategic manner. Not every alignment will be straightforward. We don't really know what teams will cook up and how much of the shift advantage they'll be able to maintain - but a safe guess is that the league batting average on ground balls in 2023 will be close to .250.
Team Examination
Here is another table of data, this time showing data on each team's 2022 season. It shows what percent of the time they deployed an infield shift, and what batting average they allowed on ground balls.
The Yankees came out on top, allowing just a .209 batting average on ground balls. You can see that they did that without shifting at a high rate, as their 26% shift rate fell in the bottom half of the league. The fact that their pitching staff was full of flame throwers that were hard to square up might have had something to do with that - but there's certainly some good fortune in there as well.
Three teams used the shift half the time or more: the Dodgers, the Astros, and the Blue Jays. The Dodgers and Astros ended up in the top half of the league in making outs on ground balls, but the Blue Jays did not have as much success.
What we see here is no direct correlation. You might have expected the highest shift rates to turn into the lowest ground-ball batting averages, but that's not really what we see. We are a little bit too focused here if we're going to talk about BABIP. The shift has an effect on line drives as well as ground balls, and when we compare team shift rates with BABIP allowed, we actually do see a pretty significant relationship there:
The Yankees, Astros, and Yankees turned balls in play into outs at the highest rate in the league, by a good margin. The Astros and Dodgers used the shift a ton - so I would say it will be tough for those two teams to replicate their BABIP success next year (however, they'll probably still be near the top of the league given how sharp they have proven to be in using the rules to their advantage).
Fantasy Baseball Players that Benefited the Most
Right off the bat, we can say that right-handed pitchers are more implicated here. Last year, right-handed pitchers had shifts on behind them 36% of the time. For lefties, it was just 26%.
This also just will not affect pitchers overall as much as hitters. The highest shift rates for hitters were north of 90%. For pitchers, only 15 qualified SPs had shifts on behind them more than half the time. Those names:
- Tony Gonsolin 65%
- Clayton Kershaw 64%
- Cristian Javier 59%
- Jose Urquidy 57%
- Jose Berrios 56%
- Tyler Anderson 56%
- Dylan Bundy 55%
- Michael Wacha 55%
- Luis Garcia 54%
- Sandy Alcantara 54%
- Justin Verlander 54%
- Alek Manoah 53%
- Pablo Lopez 50%
- Ross Stripling 50%
- Lance Lynn 50%
This does not automatically mean all of these players will regress this year. Take Javier, for example. He put away one-third of his hitters with the strikeout - so the shift has nothing to say about that. When he wasn't striking batters out, he was mostly getting balls in the air, where the shift matters a lot less as well.
High strikeout rate and high fly ball rate pitchers will be hurt less by this.
I dug further into the data to try to do some math and guess which pitchers did benefit the most. What I did was use some of the figures we find above and found out how many hits the shift took away for each pitcher.
I found how many ground balls each pitcher allowed into the shift, saw how many of those went for hits, and then re-adjusted that hits number using the league average ground ball batting average.
The top man on the list is Alcantara, so let's use him as an example. He threw the most innings by far, had a middling strikeout rate, and therefore allowed the second-most balls in play in the league (Marco Gonzales). He induced 166 grounders when a shift was on, and 30 went for hits (a low .181 BABIP). If we imagine that those shifts went away and he allowed the same number of grounders, we calculate that he would have given up an extra 11 hits on grounders (.249 times 166 gives us 41 hits, 11 more than the 30 he actually allowed). We add those 11 hits to his WHIP and see that it would have taken it from 0.97 to 1.02. On average, three total bases allowed equals one earned run, so we can calculate that it would have raised his ERA by about 0.17 runs - a pretty sizeable jump.
In the entire league, I calculate on 26 pitchers gained more than five hits from the shift being deployed. Anything less than five is pretty negligible, so it's safe to say that those names wouldn't have seen a WHIP or ERA change that we should be doing anything about for 2023.
The biggest ERA beneficiary appears to be Tony Gonsolin, who saw a 65% shift rate and allowed just 13 hits on the 94 ground balls he allowed into the shift. That is a .139 batting average - something that would be likely unsustainable even without the rule changes coming into play. Everything went Gonsolin's way last year. The calculation here is that Gonsolin would have had about a 2.42 ERA instead of the low 2.14 number he posted - and that's just with the shift changes being considered.
The rest of the names that benefited from more than five hits are in the table below.
I am downgrading the names we see above slightly because of all of this, and pretty much not worrying about this for any other pitcher. I think we are very likely to see the field overreact to this news, but when you look into the data, you see that most pitchers just didn't have the shift on behind them very often, and it only helps in a small subset of their outcomes anyways (strikeouts, fly balls, most line drives unaffected) - so the rule changes aren't likely to affect them significantly in the box score.
That's it and that's all, I'll be back soon to analyze fly ball rates from last year!
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