MLB teams, armed with a wealth of data in the 2010s, noticed that many hitters were pulling the ball to the same spots on the field. Radical defensive shifts became ubiquitous around the game, and they worked. Batting average on balls in play, which typically hover around .300, plummeted to .290 in 2022, while overall league batting average fell to .243.

In response to falling offense, baseball instituted new rules in 2023 that limited where defenders could stand. Rather than allow infielders to stand in shallow outfield, as many teams were doing, the new rules required infielders to stay within the infield dirt. Originally, a violation by the defense resulted simply in a ball being called for the batter.

But that did not provide much of a disincentive for defenders to try to stretch the

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