Doug Glanville: Who’s on First? Who Knows?

The Los Angeles Dodgers in an infield shift in a game against the San Diego Padres. Credit Denis Poroy/Getty Images

I have fond memories of playing summer softball as a pre-teenager at Ramapo Country Day Camp in New Jersey. Looking back, I realize that when my brother hit ground balls so I could practice breaking up the double play on poor unassuming middle infielder Ivan Kolodny, I was in extreme violation of today’s slide rule. And that when I moved into foul territory as a first baseman because a kid kept hooking foul balls past first, I was doing something that wouldn’t be allowed in today’s game.

At least not yet.

The defensive shift is here, probably to stay. The number of shifts employed by teams has exponentially increased every year since it “became a thing.” According to Baseball Info Solutions, in 2010 there were about 2,500 shifts; 2016 is projected to have nearly 30,000.

It isn’t just that teams are leaving entire sides of the field open. Third basemen are playing short right field. In one game against the Tigers, with Victor Martinez batting, the Orioles had six outfielders. Never mind the Cubs switching their first and third basemen in a sequence that involved the players’ changing gloves twice.

I am at the point where I’m not sure whether we should continue to use traditional position titles or just call everyone a “defender.”

It looks like an ersatz form of chess. Grown men moving guys around at a whim, desperately trying to find the best spacing — impatient, unable to wait for the next pitch without tinkering with someone. But there is math to the madness. When you consider that the data is so meticulous now that you can know if a hitter sends 80 percent of his ground balls to one part of the field, it does make sense to stack that area defensively, no matter how hideous it looks from the blimp-cam.

Sure, it messes with a lot of memories from my childhood. If I pick up the box from my Intellivision baseball game — which I still have — I see that all the players on the field are neatly in position. The shortstop is at, well, shortstop, the third baseman is near third base. A player’s position then was more than just who he was; it was an address.

During my career, I played center field, and I used scouting reports and empirical evidence to move around. But none of it would have made you doubt I was playing center field — these were quick, necessary location adjustments I made as I saw patterns in the hitter-pitcher matchup, in the weather or in a natural effect from playing in a certain stadium. Back then, after a few years in the league as a captain of the outfield, I had virtual autonomy to reposition myself and my corner outfielders.

Now the data is so deep and expansive that to reject it is to reject good help, even if you (or your outfield coach) have to sift through gigabytes of video to find what is game-useful. It has brought positioning down to a granular level, analyzing every section of the field and where and how a hitter hits it in each section. And it is situational. By count, by outs, by pitcher, by pitch type. I imagine it will get even finer as time goes on.

Baseball has always been considered a “game of adjustments,” but those adjustments are not coming from only the players anymore. They also come from the front office and the analytics department. They use historical data and patterns to turn predictive and proactive assessments into decisions, and together they are building impenetrable fortresses that frustrate hitters who can’t find ways to spray the ball around the field. Maybe of most concern to hitters is that these defensive adjustments are happening quickly.

Yet there is still this fine space left for the game. The moment, the real-time. When the ball is in flight, the action has already started, and we are all in play. Will that space get smaller as we curate many of the decisions we used to make from our sense of baseball? Or we will get so good and fast at data assessment and application that we don’t even notice it anymore? The game survives regardless, we hope.

After all, the shift is just a defensive alignment. We are used to nickel defenses in football and zones in basketball. Baseball, on its own clock, was immune to such impurity. With all that time available, we waited and enjoyed the crescendo of the pitcher-batter matchup. The pitcher was the one who started time: Don’t make me look away from the mound to figure out why the third baseman is sprinting into right field when Darryl Strawberry or Reggie Jackson is hitting.

A baseball defense is a collection of individuals with skill sets suited for the job at hand: the shortstop needs range and a good arm, the center fielder needs speed and an understanding of ballistics, the catcher need to be iron-tough and cerebral.

Or so it always was. The third baseman never had to understand how to turn a double play at second, for instance. But the shifting has made us focus on the highest goal of defense: to be a living, breathing single organism, to work in concert with pure interdependence. If you have a weakness, it can be masked much more readily. It is a shared burden.

Like any other revolution in the game, there will be some pushback. Maybe on a day when a team shifts into eight different alignments during one at-bat, with seven glove changes, and adds 12 minutes to the game.

But we must admit that time in between pitches was always open for defenses to use more wisely, even though, as a spectator, I liked the silent patience of the batter waiting for the delivery. I can hear an announcer’s voice from my childhood filling that void with color, so different from today’s need for everything to be in constant motion. But my work as an analyst of the game has convinced me that this motion has value, even if I Don’t Know is on third base, and I still wonder who’s on first.