Shifting in Baseball Still Prevalent in 2015

Major League Baseball has seen teams shift more and more over the past few seasons and the 2015 season was no exception to that. When all the shifts were tallied and all the games were played MLB teams combined for a whopping 17,733 defensive shifts on balls in play this season. That whopping number is a 33% increase from the 2014 total of 13.298.

In 2011 Major League Baseball saw just 2,357 shifts while the numbers jumped to 4,577 in 2012 and 8,180 in 2013. The stats don’t lie on the effectiveness of shifts. Sure they giveth and they taketh away from game to game and situation to situation but over the course of a 162 game schedule the shift giveth much more than it could ever think of taking away.

Colorado has the biggest increase in shifting this season as they finally adopted the strategy shifting 897 more times in 2015, up from just 114 times in 2014. Tampa Bay, the team that likely began the shifting strategy we see in the game today, led Major League Baseball in shifting this season with 1,462 shifts, a rise of 638 shifts from 2014, while the Houston Astros were second with 1,416.

The Atlanta Braves (211) and the Washington Nationals (216) have still yet to adopt the shifting strategy yet and were the two teams with the fewest shifts in 2015. The New York Yankees are known for their shifting and continued to showcase it often in 2015 taking some of the pressure off their starting pitchers and when the Yankees are doing it you know it’s time to change. They still won’t allow beards for crying out loud!