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Mississippi State third baseman Nate Chester fields in the shift against Florida. (Mike Janes/Four Seam Images)
Jim Schlossnagle found himself searching for solutions on the eve of his team’s 2024 College World Series opener against Florida.
The former Texas A&M head coach, who ranks among the nation’s most experienced college managers, needed to figure out a way for the Aggies to produce outs when facing star Florida slugger Jac Caglianone, a task that proved futile for the vast majority of teams that had already faced him that year.
So, after much consideration, Schlossnagle decided they would try something different: Every time Caglianone came to the plate, one of the Aggies’ infielders trotted deep onto the grass to give the team a fourth outfielder, while the three who remained on the dirt made their way to the right side of second base.
It was an extreme defensive shift deployed against one of college baseball’s most productive lefthanded swingers.
And Caglianone was hardly a fan.
“It doesn’t seem fair,” he said through a chuckle. “It just takes away opportunities that righties still get.”
Caglianone was among a handful of lefties who made a case for the NCAA to outlaw overshifts, just as major league baseball did ahead of the 2023 campaign. He argued that, like in MLB, lefthanded batters were being disproportionately punished relative to their righthanded counterparts.
“I get it,” Caglianone said. “It can just be frustrating sometimes.”
While Caglianone’s distaste was understandable, many of the sport’s head coaches and key administrators would go as far as to argue the exact opposite: College baseball needs the shift and banning it would only be to the game’s detriment.
“I think it’s very simple,” UCLA head coach John Savage told Baseball America. “We cannot ban the shift. Period. The quality of pitching, the quality of defense, the rate at which college players are getting to ground balls, it’s not even comparable to pro baseball. The shift is a necessary tactic for us.”
The case for the overshift at the NCAA level is reasonably straightforward, according to Savage and many of his peers. Simply put, a ban on the defensive setup would be aimed at creating more offense, as it prevents teams from positioning their infielders in favorable areas.
Trends across the sport in recent years suggest that it might need the inverse, though.
In 2021, just 129 Division I teams averaged 6.0 or more runs per contest. A year later, that total jumped to 185, and in 2023 and 2024, it skyrocketed to 229 and 228, respectively.
It’s a trend movers and shakers in the sport are trying to curb, not continue.
“When you run the metrics, we’re scoring too many runs and MLB wasn’t scoring any runs,” American Baseball Coaches Association executive director Craig Keilitz said. “Coaches feel, and I couldn’t agree with them more, that it doesn’t make sense to make it harder to get guys out. If you look at our average run production versus the pro game, we don’t need any help scoring runs. Banning the shift would create more of a problem, not solve a problem.”
Others echoed that sentiment.
“We want to keep the shift for the same reason we don’t want to go to the 18-inch base,” Duke coach Chris Pollard said. “We need to be very careful about promoting more offense in our sport … I think, for us, we’re trying to nudge the game back in the other direction and not make it be quite as offensive as it’s been the last two years.”
There’s an element of player safety to the shift, too, as growing offensive outputs have directly coincided with a steady rise in gaudy exit velocities. Four players produced maximum exit velocities of at least 117 mph in the 2024 College World Series alone, making it one of the most explosive years in the history of the event.
The trend existed in the regular season, too, as hitters somewhat routinely climbed well into the triple digits in the category.
The shift allows teams to try to field those hard-hit balls more cleanly.
“In the major leagues, there is so much data,” Kentucky coach Nick Mingione said. “We’re talking years and years and years of data on certain individuals. In college baseball, we don’t have the amount of historical data on a player. With how hard it is to hit major league pitching, it seems unfair to also put fielders in perfect positions based on that data. In college, we don’t have that level of information, and we certainly still do hit the ball hard and score in bunches.”
Added Savage: “I do not understand why they’re trying to tell you how to play on the dirt, especially when we have kids swinging aluminum bats.”
It’s important to note that many of the players who face the shift at a high rate—typically limited to the most-productive lefthanded batters—are still incredibly successful against it.
In 2024, Oregon State second baseman Travis Bazzana, Wake Forest first baseman Nick Kurtz and Caglianone—the first three lefthanded bats selected in this year’s draft—combined to bat well over .400 against the shift, including several dozen extra base hits on balls hit to the right side of second base.
In other words, even when the aforementioned players hit directly into the trap set to slow them, they still reached base.
“The best are always the best,” Keilitz said. “The superstars are superstars. They’ll still find a way to produce at a high level even as we keep allowing teams to shift them.”
Mingione said the shift will also be to the players’ benefit after the NCAA trims roster sizes to 34 players starting in 2025. Longer, higher-scoring games could put increased strain on athletes, he argued.
“If they’re going to have us go down to 34 players and we don’t get to call up new guys if someone gets hurt, we should be allowing the shift,” Mingione said. “It minimizes the impact on defenders and, again, we already score a bunch.”
Despite its widespread support, the overshift still has its detractors across the college baseball landscape.
A handful of coaches voiced concerns about fairness to lefthanded hitters. Others felt that aligning with MLB’s rules would lead to more-adequate development for infielders who eventually turn pro.
However, the controversial defensive tactic is not nearly as much of a hot button issue in college baseball circles as it might seem.
Most are vehemently opposed to its disappearance.
“I think it’s coaching,” Savage said. “I think it’s scouting. I think it’s getting the ball to go where you want it on the field, which is preparation. I’m a believer in preparation and pitch planning and defensive planning.”
The shift will remain in college.
“We enjoy seeing the ball go out of the ballpark and lots of runs being scored,” Pollard said. “But we need balance in our sport.”
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