MLB myth-buster: The shift isn't curbing runs, it's creating them

Turn on a baseball broadcast these days and there's a good chance you'll hear about launch angles, catcher framing, pitch tunneling, bullpenning and the like. Look up at the giant video screen or flip over a baseball card and you might see the hitter's WAR. For the most part, the conventional wisdom in baseball isn't much different from what you're reading about on stathead websites.

But there's one area where the conventional wisdom and the data seem to be holding totally different conversations: the shift. Shifting has gone up more than tenfold in the past seven years, and the conventional wisdom has become that the shift is something so effective, it might need to be banned entirely --…