Fascinating story. Can't really paste it in because of the graphics.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/sports/mlb-launch-angles-story/?utm_term=.5084dd8c4323

In a nutshell, there has been a significant impact from all the defensive shifts in that hitters are now focusing on getting lift. Some hitters are trying to avoid ground balls altogether. Its resulted in significant increases in batting averages and home runs. Here are three of the key notes:

The increase in frequency and efficiency of defensive shifts. According to FanGraphs, teams are shifting at a rate nearly 10 times greater than six years ago (2,974 total at-bats against shifts in 2011 vs. 33,343 in 2016). Many hitters cite this as a primary reason they have chosen to take to the air. “Teams have more information about where to play their infielders,” Headley said. “But the one ball that can’t be caught is the one that lands in the seats.” Some baseball executives say the next logical step to combat the flyball revolution will be occasional four-man outfields.

The overall increase in home runs. Hitters bashed 5,610 home runs in 2016, an increase of more than 14 percent from the year before and the most since 2000. That year turned out to be during the height of widespread performance-enhancing drug use in baseball. Maybe this new era of home-run hitting can be explained, at least partly, by more hitters simply concentrating on elevating the ball with power.

Even the issue of pace of game is tied into the flyball revolution. It’s no secret games are longer and more bloated by inaction — one of Commissioner Rob Manfred’s pet causes — in part because hitters swinging for the fences are willing to trade strikeouts for home runs and thus are willing to go deeper into counts. Meanwhile, pitchers are taking longer between pitches, which some in the game attribute to the fact mistake pitches are being turned into home runs at a higher clip than ever.

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Batting average and homers are up, illustrating the smashing success of defensive shifts. Seems like an odd take.

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With Elon, Kash, and Don

The HGH is flowing in MLB this season.

I think that Joe Posnanski explains it better, with an assist from Bill James.

https://medium.com/joeblogs/a-baseball- ... 380faa99c0

And, I suspect that the ball is juiced again

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"When people want their version of the truth, they go find it, no matter how baseless their beliefs." -- Ken Rosenthal

I suspect most of the radical swings in offensive production over the past fifty years have been due to messing with the ball rather than other factors.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Kash, and Don

You also have to go back to 1968 to find a year with less caught stealing than 2016. Hard to get caught stealing when guys are hitting home runs!!

No, I don't believe this is true.

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"All crowds boycotting football games shouldn't care who sings or takes a knee because they aren't watching." - Nas

Honestly, it does smell of PEDs, doesn't it?

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If you read it though, it makes some sense. Ground balls are mostly worthless because of the accuracy of defensive shifts. The outfield has less coverage so your best bet as a hitter is to hit it over the infielders and outfielders for doubles and home runs. I'm sure the concept of getting lift on your swing is nothing new, but it seems like a plausible explanation for the jump in averages. That said, so would PEDs.

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But think about it for a minute. If defensive shifts caused batting averages to go up- regardless of why it occurred- the shifts aren't working.

Anyway, I think there's evidence that suggests the benefits of shifting are highly overrated. Theo and the Cubs are supposedly on the cutting edge of analysis. You're a Cub fan, so I assume you watch and know they've actually moved away from radical shifting.

This is the problem I have with the way people use SABRmetrics. On the one hand they'll talk about BABIP and FIP which suggest that balls in play go places randomly. In the next argument they'll talk about the value of defensive shifts. If the balls are actually random, I'm not sure how that randomness can be outsmarted with a shift.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Kash, and Don

the problem with both things, BABIP and shifts is, if a guy misses with his location on a fastball, outside versus inside, it changes where the ball is hit, however slightly...a guy that pulls the ball, gets a fastball on the outside corner and tries to pull it, it goes to the right side of the field if he's a right handed hitter...I guess to me that belies some of the shifts, which are only based on percentages anyway...

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I think the key is the defensive shifts. Yes, the egregious shift has diminished, but they still know where to position the fielders. That said, I get your point. Defensive shifts aren't technically working because you have just forced batters to think about putting it over the fielders instead of at them.

Not trying to argue, but I would be interested to see the evidence where defensive shifts are overrated.

I agree stats are a little ridiculous. That said, I fully agree with their usage to position your players to have a potential advantage. Then its up to the players to execute after that. Stats don't win games. I just enjoy the facets of baseball, better explained by Chet's link, where balance is shifting and trying to figure out why.

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But again, the goal here is to put your players in a better position to be able to execute. The batter can have the ball hit a flying bird as it targets the shortstop causing the shortstop not to be able to make the play. It doesn't mean the defensive shift didn't work. What's interesting in all of this is that baseball is recognizing the impact of the defensive shift and trying to compensate for it.

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Well, everyone is shifting and batting averages are going up. And that's even with more batters striking out than ever.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Kash, and Don

Defensive shifts were a market inefficiency which yielded a relatively short-term (3-4 year) competitive advantage to teams who knew how to use the data efficiently. The most common efficiency was getting the slow lefty power hitter to hit a grounder to short right field. That's what's been deflating Rizzo and Schwarber's BA, for example.

Analyzing the batters side of it is now becoming a competitive necessity for these current power hitters. Carlos Pena addressed it late in his career by becoming reasonably proficient in bunting.
Now there's all the analysis of launch angle, exit velocity, etc. from the same Statcast data which gives them the defensive positioning. And the response is changing swings just enough to reduce the probability of a grounder and replace that probability with a mix of a strikeout and a long fly ball. If you can convert 80 ground ball outs a year to 65 strikeouts and 15 XBH, you've probablhy mitigated the advantage of the shift.

And if MLB juiced the ball to help those 15 XBH become more home runs....

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"When people want their version of the truth, they go find it, no matter how baseless their beliefs." -- Ken Rosenthal

Which is what I was assuming JORR would have got if he read the original article. Defensive shifts led guys like Murphy to shift their plate approach.

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Has anyone ever analyzed the effectiveness of the shift on a case by case basis? Do we know how many outs (I know that cannot be done with certainty so any analysis would be more art than science) shifts have created? I mean by that, on June 1 there was a high probability that a shift resulted in an out on this play...and have all those plays been collected and compiled?

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And men have lost their reason.

It depends on what your goal for the shift is. The obvious goal is, "did I get more outs on ground balls using the shift than hits." But that assumes you are using stats only to produce results. Going back to my opinion, the shift should put players in a better position to field their position. I'd be much more interested to see, "did the defensive shift of the fielder result in an increase in defensive stats? Were there less errors? Did his range span to the ball decrease? Were more double plays induced?" To answer your question though, I wasn't able to google one study from a recognized source. The recognized sources say things like, "yeah, but it depends".

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