I won't have much time to write this week (or the next couple weeks) due to work obligations so I'm going to keep this brief for this week. But after seeing the super-uber-mega-ultra shift that we used a few times against DJ LeMahieu last week, I decided to look into how effective our shifting had actually been. It seemed to me that, anecdotally, our shifts actually seemed to work really well this year.
And the data backs up my anecdotal feeling.
Now there are a few ways to measure effectiveness of a shift. To me, a shift is less about giving up extra base hits (normally) and more about getting more outs.