The 2016 Pittsburgh Pirates are not a Shifty Bunch

The Pittsburgh Pirates are shifting less in 2016 and their pitching is worse. Are these two related?

The Pittsburgh Pirates have earned a reputation around the league of being a very analytical front office and with good reason. The team’s use of FIP and xFIP to find value starting pitching is well known, but the shift is where the Pirates really earned their stripes as a numbers-centric team.

From 2013-2015, the Pirates shifted a total of 2,446 times, which was good for third in all of baseball behind only the Houston Astros and the Tampa Bay Rays, two teams with sabermetric driven front offices of their own.

The 2016 season is about one month old and the Pirates shifting totals are way down from the past three seasons. They have shifted only 214 times, which is the 12^th most in the league. The Pirates spent a lot of the offseason discussing their change in outfield defense by playing their outfielders a bit more shallow, but they most certainly did not mention using the shift less. What changed?

Over the winter, the Pirates traded Charlie Morton to the Philadelphia Phillies and A.J. Burnett retired. These two pitchers both have ground ball percentages over 50 percent, which is why the team used the shift very heavily in their starts. In their place, the team added Juan Nicasio and Jon Niese. Both pitchers get ground balls below 50 percent of the time. The rotation hold overs of Gerrit Cole and Francisco Liriano both also have ground ball rates below 50 percent. Only Jeff Locke (51 percent) has a ground ball rate of above 50 percent.

You hear Clint Hurdle talking about not trying to fit a round peg into a square hole, so it begs the question, are the Pirates shifting less because their rotation isn’t as ground ball-centric as in years past? The Pirates are generating less ground balls as a team this season, but despite that, their entire starting pitching rotation remains above the league average of 44 percent. Even though they are down with the loss of Morton and Burnett, they still are an above average team.

Lets compare the Pirates’ starting rotation GB rate of 48.6 to the Astros:

With 4011, no team has shifted more than the Houston Astros from 2013-2016 but despite the heavy shift totals, the team’s 2016 rotation has a below average ground ball rate of 43.4 and only ace Dallas Keuchel and Doug Fister have above average ground ball rates. Despite being the team that uses the most shifts, the Astros have not really garnered a lot of ground balls so far in 2016. Are they just shifting for the sake of it since their team does not appear to be a ground-ball focused one?

This brings us back to the Pirates and their current pitching woes. The staring rotation currently has an ERA of 4.17, which is 19^nd in the league and a FIP of 4.56, which is 27^th in the league. A far cry from 2013 to 2015 when the team had a 3.33ERA, good for second best in baseball and the fourth best FIP at 3.52. So currently the team has not been a victim of bad luck and are simply not pitching well.

Now it’s important to remember that correlation does not imply causation. Just because the Pirates are shifting less and their ERA and FIP are up does not mean the two are related, but it also doesn’t mean they are not.

You can only look at data and draw whatever conclusion you want from it and as of right now the only two facts we know are the Pirates are shifting less and their pitching is substantially worse than in the previous three seasons. It’s genuinely impossible to know how related these two things are, but it’s hard for me to think of them as purely a coincidence. The Pittsburgh Pirates made their living pitching inside, getting a high amount of ground balls right at shifted infielders, but it seems they have gotten away from this philosophy in 2016.

It appears their pitching is worse for it.

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Photo Credit – Daniel Decker Photography