Third baseman Manny Machado made a catch near the RF warning track thanks to Padres' wild shift

Quite the shift.

The defensive shift isn’t new in baseball. Even before teams invested millions is analytics and video departments, you’d see players shift to account for a batter’s tendencies.

But in recent years, shifts have turned so extreme in MLB that baseball has looked into limiting defensive positions. In Double-A, for example, an experimental rule requires teams to have a minimum of four infield players with both feet inside the infield dirt. So, under those rules, you can’t have your third baseman playing at medium-depth in right field.

That rule doesn’t exist in MLB, though. So, you can enjoy Padres third baseman Manny Machado catching a fly ball just steps from the right-field warning track.

F5 in your scorebook. pic.twitter.com/jnluovJIqN

— MLB (@MLB) September 5, 2021

During Sunday’s game between the Astros and Padres, Houston outfielder Kyle Tucker pulled a fly ball to deep right field. But the Padres didn’t have shortstop-turned-right-fielder Fernando Tatis Jr. positioned there to make the catch. Instead, Machado was there to make the running catch just shy of the track.

Given Tucker’s spray chart of a predominantly pull hitter (though he does spread the ball to all fields), the Padres evidently thought having a fourth outfielder would be the way to defend Tucker. You can see he rarely hits the ball to third:

And hey, it worked. Of course, that still gets scored as an F5 even though it’s 300 feet from third base. Baseball can be weird like that.