Will the Trend of Defensive Versatility Resume Its Rise?

It should come as no great surprise that versatility is an attractive trait in just about any profession; baseball is no exception. Defensive prowess and versatility, skills that have become more clearly quantifiable in the last decade, have increasingly been emphasized across baseball. After all, having the versatility to play two positions alone implies that a player is not anchored to the rock bottom of baseball’s defensive spectrum. Playing multiple premium positions is obviously even better.

Motivated by this, I have made use of FanGraphs data in order to take a quick glance at how defensive flexibility has fluctuated over the past 20 years.

However, defensive flexibility is a wildly broad concept and tough to really pin down. So first, a quick explanation of how it has been generally defined here. Essentially, what follows captures the number of positions that players played for at least 50 innings in any given year dating back to 2002 when data are available at FanGraphs. Why 50 innings? Really, there is no reason, outside of it being an arbitrarily round number as well as being a figure large enough to suggest the defensive placement wasn’t due to an emergency replacement alone.

After pulling data for all players in the last 20 seasons with at least 50 innings at one position in any given season, the number of positions that each player played was aggregated and assigned to that player. Pitchers were excluded as pitching-types (not named Shohei Ohtani) generally don’t play multiple positions.

Below is the average number of positions played, per season, by those qualifying players.

In any given season, most players play just one position. That said, enough players field multiple positions that across all position players the average number of positions played across all players has been between 1.4-1.6 (until the pandemic). However, before 2020, defensive flexibility (by this measure anyway) looked to have been consistently on the rise throughout the entirety of the 2010s (and it is maybe not a coincidence that defensive measures were improving significantly across this timeframe).

As for the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, playing just 60 games likely forced fewer players into stopgap defensive roles. A lot happens in a season from games 61-162, and the exclusion of those games clearly impacted the number of positions many players fielded. Additionally, it is conceivable (but not proven here by any means) that teams required less versatility given 28-man rosters in 2020 or simply wished not to push their players in an otherwise unique and strange season.

Through >60 games in 2021, the average number of positions played by each player has already eclipsed 2020’s average and will surely continue to rise as this season grinds on. Whether the upward trend in defensive flexibility resumes following its pandemic-induced dive remains to be seen, though.

Depicting league-wide versatility another way, the visualization below offers a quick look at the percentage of players who played just one position (or if they played others, only did so for <50 innings) in each of the last 20 seasons.

The pre-pandemic single-position apogee on the above chart, 69.88% in 2006, is >10% higher than the low-water mark in 2018 – 59.66. Thus considerably fewer players, following a decade-long trend, were playing just one position by the late 2010s. As an example, in 2006 assuming a 13-man group of position players on a team, slightly more than 9 were used exclusively at one position. In 2018, assuming the same roster construction, slightly fewer than 8 players on average were single-position players.

However, resembling the inverse of the first chart’s trend wherein average number of positions by players plummeted, the percentage of single-position players leaps upward corresponding to the pandemic in 2020.

Finally, below is a chart of the complete data, which includes the number of players who fall into each classification of number of positions played.

The players who played 7 different positions for at least 50 innings in the season include: Brock Holt (2014), Andrew Romine (2017), and Danny Santana (2019). The players who played 6 distinct positions for at least 50 innings include: Luis Gonzalez (2004) and Niko Goodrum (2018). 21 of 35 5+ position player-seasons have come in the last 8 seasons, which include the pandemic. Players like Kiké Hernández and Marwin González make the 5+ list multiple times, justifying their perception as versatile utility players.

Given all this information, should I have to guess, the pandemic will not deter the longer term trend of heightened versatility but rather in several years’ time be an isolated spike on the radar.