Anthony Rizzo understands New York.
Molded by ten years in the Chicago media market and 39 postseason games with the Cubs, the 33-year-old didn’t mince words when he agreed to come back to the Bronx.
“Everyone loves you when you’re good,” Rizzo said after signing a two-year deal in November to return to the Yankees.
It was a brutally honest assessment of Yankee fandom, and Rizzo’s signing marked one of the first major moves in what has proven to be a very busy offseason around Major League Baseball. Rizzo’s comments throughout the press conference showed that he is not hiding from the rabid Yankee fan base, the pressures that come with the pinstripes or the unavoidable talking point that is the World Series drought.
He’s right, of course. The easiest way for any athlete to endear themselves to fans is by playing well. Easier said than done, sure, but saying it out loud serves as a sign that Rizzo both gets how this city works and wants to hold himself to a high standard. In his brief time in New York, he’s already seen the claws come out for Joey Gallo, Aaron Hicks and Josh Donaldson. Where those players have fallen victim to debilitating slumps — and in Gallo’s case, never truly recovered — Rizzo has been steadily excellent. His .804 OPS and 40 long balls in 179 games with the Yankees made him not only a no-brainer to re-sign, but also a pretty necessary component of the team.
He stands to be even better next season, too, thanks to a change that’s tailor made for him. The part of Rizzo’s statistical profile that has drooped the most is his batting average. A .272 hitter with the Cubs, Rizzo has batted just .230 with his new team. Part of that is the collective lack of importance placed in batting average these days — his Yankee on-base percentage, valued much more heavily by front offices, is .338, comfortably above league average — but part of it is also due to the shift.
In 2023, defenses will no longer be able to station an infielder in shallow right field against left-handed pull hitters, something that had become as commonplace as peanuts and Cracker Jack. For Rizzo, a lefty who’s pulled 42% or more of his batted balls during each of the last ten seasons, the shift limitations are going to quite literally open a whole new world for him. While Rizzo’s flyball rate made a huge jump (it sat below 40% for five straight years before elevating to 49.3% in 2022) he still puts the ball on the ground with regularity. When you combine grounders and a pull-happy approach with a second baseman playing in the right field grass, you get a left-handed hitter who loses a bunch of base hits.
“I’ve been very affected [by the shift],” Rizzo readily admitted when the topic came up during his welcome back press conference. Living through hard hit ball after hard hit ball that became a 4-3 putout, plus the ubiquity of data showing him how often he falls victim to the shift, has made Rizzo acutely aware of the struggle.
By just looking at elementary spray charts (which are publicly available), the area of Rizzo’s frustration could not be clearer. Starting by looking just at the outs he made in 2022, the densest cluster lies just behind the second baseman’s traditional post.
If we look at the different types of contact he was making, we also find that many of those outs came on ground balls and line drives, which previously spent a hundred years evading fielders.
Examining where his hits came from also paints a very solid picture of modern baseball. Now that second basemen have to remain on the dirt and abide by the rules of the postmodern game, that empty space in shallow right field will be full of orange dots in the future.
Rizzo’s shift issues were especially prevalent in Yankee Stadium, where right field is already the size of a child’s playpen and can be easily covered if two fielders are stationed out there, to the point that any hit into the shift basically had to be right down the line or straight up over the fence. Infielders will still be able to roam around the dirt and position themselves in spots where hitters go most often, but by restricting their outfield privileges, Rizzo and other southpaws can freely roll grounders through the right side without worrying about being thrown out at first by a guy standing 250 feet from home plate.
This could potentially lead to right fielders at Yankee Stadium playing Rizzo much shallower, hoping to take away the low liners and bloopers that used to be gloved by their shifted second baseman. Any ball over a right fielder’s head at Yankee Stadium is likely to either be a home run or a double anyway, so trying to poach the in-between singles away from lefties may be one of the results of these new rules. Still, there is much more room for Rizzo — as well as other lefties whose home games aren’t in a studio apartment — to raise their batting averages by several points.
The rest of the league has also taken this into account, as seen by some of the free agent deals given to fellow lefty pull machines. Gallo and Cody Bellinger got $11 and $17.5 million contracts this offseason, respectively, despite being plainly terrible last year. Michael Conforto signed for two years and $36 million even though he hasn’t played a single inning in 15 months. There are certainly parts of their games that the Twins, Cubs and Giants think they can fix, but knowing that their freshly-signed sluggers won’t be futilely hitting into dramatic shifts anymore had to also be enticing for them.
It was certainly on Rizzo’s mind, and if you’re the gambling type, consider taking the over on Rizzo’s projected 2023 batting average.
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