Baseball in today’s age is wildly different than how baseball has been played for a majority of it’s history. For it being America’s pastime, it certainly has not passed time with all of the changes it has made to the way it has been played. From replay reviews, to time clock for in between hitters and innings, to now this crazy thing that defenses are doing called "The shift".
So what is the shift and why do teams do it so much now in today’s MLB? A great deal of it has to do with what teams are extrapolating from their fantasy baseball analysis of how the game is being played. So a shift is when a team changes the normal alignment, where you have two position players on each side of the field, to a new and augmented alignment, where you can have three or even four players on side of the field.
So what is the reasoning? With sabermetrics having impacted the way we study the game so much, coaches have a plethora of stats at their disposal that they use to try and predict the outcome of the game, an inning, an at-bat, and even a single pitch. So when they go through the daily fantasy baseball research and see that a left-handed power hitter pulls the ball at nearly a sixty to seventy percent rate, they are going to shift based on the prediction to do it again.
If you have the data that shows this is what a guy usually does, wouldn’t you use it to your advantage? Many of baseball purists absolutely hate the idea of shifts because they believe that it has ruined the basic game play of baseball in how it was supposed to be plaid. Others refute that and say that if you want to predict what is going to happen, and adjust your alignment accordingly. Whether we like the infusion of statistics into the game of baseball, it is here to say and will most likely be integrated more and more as clubs figure out the best ways to utilize all of this information that they are now being exposed to. At the same time, the shift presents an excellent fantasy baseball opportunity for hitters to beat the shift my simply putting the ball where the players are not. If they are going to line up almost exclusively on the right side of the infield, as a hitter, you have to be willing to take the ball the other way and look for extra bases. It sounds simple in theory but then again, there is a reason that these guys do it for a living while we don’t.
