Gregory Polanco Facing Increasingly Shifty Defenses

This year, many teams have played infield shifts against Gregory Polanco, but recently, teams have started to shift their outfields as well.  Is this approach working against El Coffee?

Gregory Polanco has been hitting in the big leagues for the better part of three years and has built up a solid resume of over 1300 at-bats.  Opposing teams have a lot of data to work with when deciding how to place their defenders against him.  Many teams play an infield shift against Polanco when no one is on base, loading up the right side of the infield.  Often the shortstop will play on the first base side of second base and the second baseman will play shallow right field.  Sometimes, the third baseman will simply vacate his spot and come over to play shallow right field.  These kinds of shifts against a left-handed pull hitter are not uncommon.

What is strange is some teams are starting to shift the outfield towards left field against Polanco.  This first came to our attention in the Houston Astros series (August 22-24) where the Astros positioned their right fielder in the right-center gap, and moved their center fielder to the left-center gap.   In that series, the right fielder was over 200 feet from the right field foul line (normal positioning would be 80-120 feet).  This meant that they were conceding a Polanco fly ball to into the right field corner in exchange for making an out on a right-center gap shot.  Strange to say the least.  You can see the Astros outfield shift in Travis Sawchick’s tweet.

Astros with an extreme outfield shift against Polanco pic.twitter.com/Z92F5xyo4j

— Travis Sawchik (@Travis_Sawchik) August 24, 2016

Houston employed the most dramatic outfield shift we’ve seen, but other teams are also shading their outfield to the left when Polanco is at the plate.  We started to dig into each of these shift strategies to see if they are warranted.  First, we took a look at Polanco’s spray chart for his MLB career, which includes the 2014, 15 and 16 seasons.

Spray chart courtesy of Brooks Baseball 

Infield Shift Effective

Over the course of the last three seasons, Polanco has definitely hit a lot of ground balls (green dots) to the right side of the infield, but he has also hit a fair number of grounders to the left side.  This chart, by itself, is not compelling enough to dictate an infield shift every time Polanco is up with nobody on base.

However, when you narrow in on Polanco’s spray chart for the 2016 season, you can see a much more exaggerated concentration of ground balls to the right side of the infield.  Polanco is developing into a classic pull hitter and this sort of grouping would drive most teams to put the infield shift on Polanco.

Spray chart courtesy of Brooks Baseball

Outfield Shift no so Much

But what about shading the outfield drastically towards left field?  Judging simply by the spray chart, it is not immediately obvious that Polanco favors left and center field on his line drives and fly balls.  In fact, his 2016 spray chart shows that of the balls that make it to the outfield, he is distributing them roughly equally among left, center and right field.  So why would a team put an outfield shift on Polanco?

The answer may be in an analysis of the hang time of Polanco’s hits to each location.  Consider the chart below which captures the hang time of all outfield balls hit by Polanco in the 2016 season.  If you only look at balls that are in the air for longer than 3 seconds (purple and blue dots on the chart), you can see a slight clustering around center field.  Concentrating outfielders in the center field areas, like the Astros did, would ensure that these fly balls are all caught.  However, this leaves the right field line open.  As you can see, there are a significant amount of balls hit in that area which have hang times between 3 and 4.5 seconds (purple dots).  A traditionally placed right fielder will run down many of these balls, whereas a right fielder shifted into the right center gap is not going to have a prayer at making many of those plays.  It seems like for every extra out you’d make, you’d be giving up an extra base hit into the right field corner.  Typically, that is not a good use of a shift.

Hang time chart courtesy of FanGraphs

It could be that the Astro’s game plan with Polanco was to pitch Polanco outside, expecting him to go the other way.  If so, this plan backfired on the Astros as Polanco burned them with a double and a triple into the right field corner.  In the three game series, he only made one out that you could stretch and say was due to the outfield shift – a line drive to left field that was caught because the left fielder was playing towards the line.  Overall, the outfield shift did not work for the Astros.

However, on August 27^th, against the Milwaukee Brewers, Polanco ripped a bases-loaded double into the right-center gap that scored three go-aheads runs.  This would prove to make the difference in the game.  If the Brewers would have been playing the Astros shift in that scenario, Polanco’s drive would have been caught.  The only other balls Polanco hit into the outfield that series would have been caught with or without the shift (one was a home run that a shift isn’t going to help much against).  So the Brewers would have come out ahead playing an outfield shift against Polanco.

Bottom Line

Of course, looking at the results of a shift in any one series is not going to tell you a compelling story as the sample size is too small.  We took a look at all of Polanco’s hits to the outfield in 2016 and took note of where a shift would have turned a hit into an out and vice versa.  In our analysis, infield shifts have worked against Polanco, especially in the 2016 season.  In contrast, outfield shifts have failed just as many times as they have succeeded.  Therefore, we would be surprised to see teams continuing to shift the outfield against Gregory Polanco.

Photo Credit: Gina Riley