SUWANEE, Ga. — Seventy-six players qualified for the 2014 American League batting title. Of that group, Brian McCann placed 76th, dead-last, in batting average on balls in play.
That speaks somewhat to his lack of speed running from home to first base. It speaks a great deal to opponents’ abilities to properly defense the pull-prone McCann in this shift-prone era. So this offseason, in preparation for his second season as the Yankees’ catcher, McCann is ready to take on the challenge of the shift.
“Now that the shifting’s involved, it’s time for me to take a step back and figure out. Now I’ve got to beat the shift,” McCann said Wednesday. “I’ve hit a certain way for nine years. The shift obviously is more advanced. So hits that I’ve always had in the past are now outs. I hit .290, .280, now you’re hitting .240, .230. It’s time for me to make that adjustment, and I went into this offseason, and that’s where I’m at.”
In the first seven years of his major league career, McCann produced a .286/.358/486 slash line. In his last three seasons, he dropped to .238/.305/.419; he started his Yankees career with a .232 batting average.
McCann spends his winters working at an indoor batting cage, in a house on his block that used to be owned by former Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek. The current owner, Ed Cook, lets McCann and his brother Brad, a former minor league player, come and go as they please. This offseason, McCann has worked to tweak his hitting approach.
“I’m trying to shorten my swing up a little bit, trying to use the whole field,” McCann said. “Not just go up there and look for my pitch. Shorten up sometimes and take that hit to left. The more times you do that, they’ll stop shifting.”
New baseball commissioner Rob Manfred, best known in Yankees circles as Alex Rodriguez’s former nemesis, has a fan in McCann. Manfred recently told ESPN he would be open to the idea of banning defensive shifts, and McCann not surprisingly loves that idea.
“I think the one thing that you get is pace of play. That’s the one thing everybody’s trying to get better at,” McCann said.
He raised the idea of the Yankees, for instance, shifting the defensively superior Brett Gardner from left field to right field when a lefty pull hitter is up, then back to left field for a righty hitter.
“You want to make it a five-hour game? Let’s go ahead and start doing that,” he said. “Eventually, that’s what it’s going to be. Someone’s going to do that. You’re already taking the third baseman and putting him on the other side of second base, and you’re calling time to make that happen. That’s eventually going to be the issue, for me.”