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

[Comduklakis]

As a Tigers franchise player I get a standard shift for Gerald Saltalamachia and Victor Martinez every time out. And it kills Victor since I can't seem to not pull the ball with him (I have a problem staying back in general). Beyond that I don't see shifts against any of my players.

I let the CPU decided when to shift on defense for me and it seems to work fine. I certainly have taken away some hits (almost all against lefthanders) with the shift.

I think in the future it does need to be based on both tendencies and also on real stats. If a guy is having an extreme pull year, the AI should respond accordingly, just as most teams do IRL.

[decga]

Quote: Originally Posted by Hammerhunker

I think defensive alignment strategy needs to be the next big focus, and have said this in my circles for years. Aside from the occasion shift, bunt coverage, double play depth, the cpu never "adjusts", always straight up,vanilla, generic, zero effort in this area. By the way, Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941 not .408. He did hit .407 in 1953 but with only 93 at bats (http://www.baseball-reference.com/pl...illite01.shtml)

First of all, I use the shift based on the hitter's chart and game. You gotta remembered to pitch to the shift.
Also while playing in offline franchise the CPU started using the extreme shift against Freddie Freeman.

[TheWarmWind]

Since this post I've started using the shift even more, and I've been having a ton of success with it. I almost never use the extreme shifts or shift the outfield though, and even when I do, I straighten it out a bit when I get to two strikes.

What I've been doing instead in the outfield is varying the depth of the fielders a lot. For example a pull lefty with average power comes to the plate, and I'll put my LF Shallow, my CF Normal and my RF Deep. Combined with the soft right shift of the infield, it's a strat that has seen a lot of success.

The shift system is annoying though. Wish I could save my shifts for individual guys, and customize shifts for runners on base/count. Right now I'm spending a ton of time each defensive at bat fiddling around with settings, and the quick shifts seemed to be programmed to be as useless as possible.

[NYJin2011tm]

On auto defense why doesn't the defense guard lines late in close games?

[NimitsTexan]

Of course, a human player can always counter the shift like the Cubs did Thursday night (need to try that more often in my games) . . .

[nomo17k]

I wish there's a little more flexibility in how "preset" can be tweaked to my liking. Rather than only been able to use them, I wish there is a way to store user-customizable shifts and load them while in the game (potentially assigning to players before the game starts).

It is difficult to effectively use shifts in online games because we get penalized for pausing.

As for the effectiveness of using defensive shifts, I think some shifts are more effective than others. For example, laying down perfect bunt is still quite a bit easier in the game than IRL (proof is that there are still many bunters online) and I find the only way to prevent them is to make the corner infielders come in.

So at least for bunt shift it is very useful... I hope it becomes a bit harder to lay down bunt so that I don't have to keep using bunt shifts in online games.

Shifting for push and pull is kinda hard to notice as we don't have an easier way to view where hits are landed on the field in the game. So empirically I don't know if using those shifts has really helped that much (I use auto-shift most of the time). But from what has been said, push/pull tendency has been implemented in terms of hitting timing window shift, so when we are hitting especially, we are still mostly in control of that timing, so the game may have a difficult time reproducing push/tendency.

I think the last issue is something to think about, as, ideally, AI should shift to the actually tendency observed by how we play, not to the programmed tendency to which we may or may not adhere to when we control in-game players.

I have a player in RTTS with whom I wanted to simulate Ichiro, and there are a few types of hits AI doesn't field well (due to not adapting to my hitting tendency and also due to some slow animation issues). Without changing my approach, I have been able to hit for a very high average because I have learned to "exploit" them. IRL and with the current climate in MLB, human manager/players would quick try to plug up the hole like this.

In short (why put it at the end...), I think fielding shift is an area where The Show can grow further and make the game more dynamic... so I hope it continues to improve.