A shift in expectations: Which Orioles batters might benefit without the infield shift next year?

Hint: It's not anyone who has joined the organization this winter.

The Orioles’ offseason pursuit of left-handed hitting has made sense for a few underlying reasons; their ballpark favors them, the current lineup features a lot of right-handed hitters, etc. Another, at least in my mind, was that the elimination of the shift in 2023.

Without the ability to put an infielder in short right field, it seems reasonable to think that there are going to be some left-handed hitters who fare much better next summer than they have in recent years. (Please spare the Chris Davis jokes in this holiday season of joy.)

So naturally, the Orioles’ largest splash when it comes to adding to their lineup this winter has been Adam Frazier, the left-handed hitter who had the fifth-most plate appearances without the shift in 2022 with Seattle (524 of 601 total) and had a weighted on-base average (wOBA) of .268 without the shift and .344 with it–nothing like what I expected when I started checking out Baseball Savant, the source of this data.

That seems to be a bit of an anomaly when it comes to past years, when in 2021 and 2019 Frazier still wasn’t shifted often but had better results against traditional defenses than. Since the start of 2019, Frazier has a .311 wOBA when shifted and .314 when he’s not. The point is there’s not a huge gulf in his outcomes shift or no shift over a long period of time, but that doesn’t apply to everyone on the Orioles’ roster. In some cases, it’s a wide enough gulf to make one wonder if there’s enough offensive improvement baked into this factor alone for 2023 to explain why Frazier is the only major league free agent they’ve added to the lineup so far.