How Well Could the Twins Hide Luis Arraez in the Field?

I recently wrote about why I think the Twins should make Alex Kirilloff their Opening Day left fielder. That position is predicated on him having a solid spring training, though. Should he struggle, or deal with nagging injuries, the team would be wise to have him spend not merely a few token weeks, but a few edifying months in St. Paul. In that case—or in case the team does make the penny-wise, pound-foolish decision to hold him back for service-time reasons—Arraez will probably open the season as the regular left fielder for the parent club.

In my live looks at him in that position in 2019, I felt that he was better than he’s been given credit for. Furthermore, Arraez has been optimistic and assertive this spring about his expectation that he will play plenty of left field, and do it well. Still, for the moment, let’s assume that he’s going to have a rough time out there. Even compared to a year and a half ago, he’s gotten a half-step slower, and his legs continue to be sources of pain and frustration. Let’s imagine that Arraez is slotted in as the everyday left fielder for the first half of this season, and that he’s basically a weak-armed Eddie Rosario out there. If all of that comes to pass, how would the Twins minimize the damage? And how well should we expect it to work?

First of all, let’s think about what makes for the least damage when an outfielder is stretched at their position. I spoke to Jake Cave about his experiences in center field, back in June 2019. He talked about playing deeper in center than any other player in baseball, and about the advantages he gained therefrom. Some of them are intuitive, and have become macro-level conventional wisdom of modern outfield positioning: the deeper one plays, the fewer balls can get over one’s head, or past them into the gaps. One might give up a few more singles, but the hits taken away by playing deeper are usually for extra bases.

Other edges gained by playing deeper are more idiosyncratic, and must be considered through the prism of the individual. Cave is comfortable playing deeper, because he feels he can take an extra split-second to read the ball off the bat before he gets moving. As he notes, more athletic, more explosive athletes sometimes prefer to play shallower, get moving sooner, and then change course if and when they need to do so.

Arraez is, shall we say, much more Cave than Byron Buxton, and when he played left field in 2019, he did so from a very deep starting position. That allowed him to handle the position fairly well, in my estimation. Though his reads on balls over his head were much maligned, he did make at least one memorably solid play on a ball hit to the wall at Target Field, and he was solid on everything hit to the sides of or in front of him, within his fairly limited range.

If he’s sent back to left field on a regular basis in 2021, Arraez can afford to play as deep as he wants. That’s because, now that the Twins have Josh Donaldson and Andrelton Simmons on the left side of the infield, the odds of any ground ball going through the left side are slightly lower. The better an infield defense a team has, the deeper the outfielders can afford to play, without allowing baserunners to take extra bases on ground-ball hits. Simmons also plays remarkably deep at shortstop, not only maximizing his range on grounders, but allowing him to range farther into left field on bloopers and pop-ups than most shortstops do. That gives Arraez a little extra prospective peace of mind in playing deep.

Of course, that only helps in a very limited way. It would really make the Twins’ defense more efficient if, in addition to having the wall in front of him on the left side of the infield, Arraez could get help from Buxton, in the form of the blazing-fast center fielder shading opposing batters toward that side. Most of the time, in a modern defense, that isn’t especially feasible. Next time you see an infield shift three players to one side of second base, watch the center fielder. As if swung that way by a counterweight, they will almost always shade the hitter toward the opposite field. It’s a defense mechanism built into shifts: the center fielder, opposite-field outfielder, and the lone infielder on the opposite side of the diamond have to cheat slightly toward the gaping spaces left by the probabilistic move of clustering fielders on the batter’s pull side.

Simmons and Donaldson have enough range to give the Twins better options. With those two on the left side of the infield, right-handed batters should hardly ever face shifted infields. That means that, if a righty with good power toward the gap in left-center is due at the plate, Buxton should be able to cheat toward that gap, without worrying as much about a mi**** or defensive swing turning into a two-base gapper the other way. Shifts are valuable in terms of probabilities, but they can also force suboptimal secondary choices. Without shifts in place, the Twins can put three near-elite defenders in close enough proximity to Arraez to make his defensive limitations in left field relatively unimportant.

The team did something similar over the last two seasons, with Jorge Polanco. Rightfully concerned about Polanco’s defense at shortstop, the team increased its use of shifts, to put him in better positions to make the plays of which he’s capable, and to help other defenders cover for his lack of range. Obviously, it’s impossible for any set of teammates to wholly take on the defensive responsibilities of a given player, without sacrificing too much of their own positioning. Wisely applied, however, defensive gameplans can incrementally shrink the area (and the value of the area) for which a poor fielder is responsible. This time around, the Twins have the personnel to hide a bad glove man by removing shifts they might otherwise have used. That’s another in a long series of steps forward the team’s run-prevention has taken since 2018.

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