MLB in 2023: Why banning the shift might hurt baseball
By Bill Felber
The K rate
Factor the strikeout data into the equation and the tendency to blame the shift for making baseball less interesting becomes a lot more questionable.
In 2008, when the MLB batting average was .264 and shifts were only occasionally employed, the league-wide strikeout rate was 17.5 percent. That rate had increased gradually over the decades, but for our purposes it can be thought of as a contemporary baseline.
Look what’s happened since then. The strikeout rate rose to 18.6 percent in 2011, to 20.4 percent in 2015, and to 23 percent in 2019. The rate peaked at 23.2 percent in 2021 before receding slightly to 22.4 percent last season.
The impact of those numbers ought not to be glossed over. Had the 2008 strikeout rate held at 17.5 percent in 2022, that would have meant nearly 9,000 more balls in play … close to four more balls in play per game. Based on current averages, about 2,200 of those additional balls in play would have been base hits, increasing the 2022 MLB batting average from .243 to about .256.
And there would be no discussion about the problem with shifts, or for that matter what to do about the lack of action in baseball.
MLB implemented the shift ban following a two-season experiment conducted at the Double-A level. Before jumping to any hard and fast conclusions regarding the ban’s consequences, it’s worth looking at the data that experiment produced.