A guilty pleasure of mine is the film, Artie Lange’s Beer League. It’s more or less a love letter to all things New Jersey, featuring Artie Lange and a bunch of small time New Jersey losers who enjoy beer league softball in their town while going through the motions of their own mundane lives. It’s by no means good, but to someone who appreciates sophomoric humor, rec league softball, and one of the random things that Ralph Macchio actually performs in, the flick still holds a place in my well as a go-to for a cheap and reliable laugh.
One of the things in the film that I make references to almost regularly is The DeVanzo Shift, a defensive strategy employed by one of the antagonist teams, designed to feast on the fact that Artie Lange is completely incapable of hitting the ball to anywhere but the left side of the field, so the Manganelli Fitness team blatantly positions all fielders on the left, leaving the right side completely open. Naturally, being the underachiever he is, Artie still hits the ball into the teeth of the defense and is easily rendered out.
Throughout the last decade or so, Major League Baseball has gone in the direction of teams employing radical shifts, in order to capitalize on the tendency of more and more hitters to pull the ball more than anything else, because pulling = power, power = homers, and homers = $$$. It’s become laughably commonplace these days that every team’s left-handed power bats will see shifts where either a second baseman or a shortstop will position themselves pretty much in shallow right field, and be pitched in manners that will try to get them to hit it directly into the shifts.
Regardless, any team that shifts will almost always still have a guy or two position on the opposite side of the field, in the event that a hitter will drop a bunt to counter the shift, or some fluke of a swing slaps a ball to the opposite side of the field. After all, these are paid professionals who are supposedly the best in the world at baseball and should be able to read a defense and react accordingly to how the opposition is trying to play them. So shifts are not uncommon in the big leagues, but it’s like we’d ever see a real DeVanzo Shift in the majors.
That is, until Joey Gallo started playing baseball for the Texas Rangers. Apparently the book is pretty short and concise on Gallo: strikes out a ton, and if he makes contact with the ball, he’s pulling it. And the Houston Astros have clearly gotten the message, and have basically deployed the DeVanzo Shift, in Major League Baseball. The Astros positioned nearly every single fielder on the right side of the field, save for left fielder Marwin Gonzalez, who was the sole left-side safety net in the event that Gallo hit anything remotely to the left. Needless to say, the Astros were very confident that they were going to get Joey Gallo to hit a ball to the right side of the field.