MLB shift ban could alter offense in multiple ways
The seemingly endless tinkering with the game of baseball has left bettors scrambling at the start of each new season. It takes a pretty significant sample size of data to decide whether or not something is real or just variance, but there are some things we can assume about the shift ban as the 2023 season plays out.
Will the shift ban mean fewer home runs?
One interesting early return is that batted ball distance and launch angle are down in the early going. Publicly available Statcast data goes back to 2015. Throughout that time, the frequency of the shift has grown and grown. As a result, many teams decided to suggest to their players to hit the ball in the air to try and drive it over the shift. That led to the lowest batting averages we’ve seen since the 1960s and a lot of home runs, strikeouts and walks.
The ban on the shift has already had an impact on both launch angle and batted ball distance for this season.
Here are the batted ball distances (feet) and launch angles (degrees) in the Statcast era: