MLB The Show 16 News Post

The Shift is Taking Over Baseball, But What About The Show?

02:46 PM - October 14, 2016 by RaychelSnr

Sixty years ago, a player-manager from the Cleveland Indians named Lou Bodreau came up with a defensive strategy to stop Ted Williams' brilliant hitting.

At the time, Williams was playing some of the best baseball ever -- even compiling a .408 batting average in a single season.

In an attempt to stop Williams, Bodreau came up with a defensive shift which was unorthodox but ended up effective:

Quote:


	"[Boudreau] said, this is what I want you to do: See the the stuff I put on the blackboard? When I yell �Yo!�, that�s when everybody takes the position that I put on the blackboard,� Russ Schneider, Boudreau�s biographer, told me. �And the players said, �What�re you, crazy?� Even his coaches said the same thing. �You can�t do that! How can you do that?� He said, �We�re gonna do it.�� What Boudreau was diagramming would eventually go down in baseball lore as the �Ted Williams Shift.� It was a simple case of playing the percentages: Boudreau knew Williams was an extreme pull hitter, and therefore more likely to make an out if more defenders were shifted to the right side of the field. So he rolled out a crazy-looking alignment that packed all four infielders between first and second base..."

The shift has taken over baseball this year. The number of balls in play hit with a defensive shift on went from under 5% in 2011 to almost 30% of all balls in play this year.

As offensive numbers go down, there is some talk of banning the shifts in order to boost offensive numbers as one of many rules changes.

But so long as they're here, are you using defensive shifts in MLB The Show 16? If so, how effective have they been vs. a more traditional defensive alignment?