Defensive positioning success
It's been a while back, but I remember it being said on the air that the Braves were one of the fourth of teams in the league who had given up more hits than they had prevented with defensive shifts. Honestly I'm assuming that they had read something that I haven't been able to find because I doubt our TV announcers thought of this on their own. I'm not sure how the person who determined this made that determination. I suppose it could have been hit probabilities or simply BABIP when a shift was or was not on. I don't know how I would find an updated version of this.
I bring this up for a couple of reasons. First of all I'm wondering whether it would still hold true. It seems like we've given up a lot of soft hits, but that may be perception. It also seems like our middle infield defense hasn't been nearly as good this year. This goes for Ozzie and Dansby, and they should both be excellent defenders. They certainly were last year, but now they are rather average.
My unproven theory is that moving players around and changing fielding and throwing angles could affect some players negatively in terms of fielding effectiveness. I do know we've certainly shifted more including against right handed hitters. I apologize if there are things about this that I should know, and there are some people on here that would be far more sophisticated than I am with metrics that might pick something like this up, but it's just a thought on my part. Our middle infield defense does clearly seem to be to be not as good this year.
