As teams cobble together their rosters this winter, they must tackle this riddle thrown at them: How will the ban on shifts change offense and defense? Baseball will look different next season—at least from the past seven years or so, when shifts grew prevalent, sucked more than 2,000 hits out of the game and deemphasized range at second base.
We have so much data on how shifts changed baseball that it is not difficult to make an educated guess as to what will happen next year without them. My top conclusions:
1. The MLB batting average should increase from .243 last season (the fifth-worst ever, and the worst in 54 years) to .255 (equaling the highest since 2011).
