Shift or Get Off the Pot

Here is an excerpt from the article in The Fielding Bible—Volume IV called Shift or Get Off the Pot:

Every team in baseball is shifting way more often than they did as few as three years ago. And it is paying off. But there are 10 teams (a third of the league) who shifted less than 260 times each for the season. Collectively they saved 27 runs (less than three runs per team). The other two thirds of the teams more than doubled their effectiveness, averaging over eight Shift Runs Saved per team.

I would give these 10 teams the same advice we gave in The Fielding Bible—Volume III after the 2012 season:

"If I were running a Major League Team, I would employ The Shift far more often…", or as the title of this article says, "Shift or Get Off The Pot."

When BIS developed its BIS-D defensive positioning software in 2006, very little interest was shown by major league teams. Now in 2015, more than half the teams in MLB subscribe to at least one of the many defensive-oriented products provided by Baseball Info Solutions.

Shift or Get Off the Pot and more of our latest shift research, Expected Stolen Base Success rates, Strike Zone Plus/Minus, and much more will be available in The Fielding Bible—Volume IV, which will be released on March 1, 2015 and is available for pre-order now.