Ben Paulsen stepped to the plate in Phoenix and into a puzzle factory. Everything was jumbled.

The left-handed batter looked to the left at a lonely third baseman, Jake Lamb, with 90 feet of dirt real estate all to himself. Paulsen turned to the right and saw a bucket of snakes.

Arizona Diamondbacks shortstop Nick Ahmed was playing second base. Second baseman Chris Owings drifted deep into the grass playing in right field. And right fielder Yasmany Tomas was so deep, he basically lined up in the Chase Field swimming pool outside the outfield wall.

Say hello to 21st-century baseball.

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Buoyed by more than a season’s worth of successful field testing, major-league teams not only are sticking with the defensive shift, they’re walking further and further from tradition.

In the process, teams are getting more and more bold.

Paulsen, the Rockies’ rookie first baseman, had only 172 career plate appearances when he saw that dramatic shift during a June 24 game against Arizona — hardly an overwhelming set of data.

“I felt like I didn’t get shifted on until I got a pinch hit against Houston — the first game, against Luke Gregerson. I hit, like, a seeing-eye through the four hole. And that’s when they started doing the monster shift,” Paulsen said of his hit June 15 past second base into right field. “And then the Diamondbacks did an almost overblown shift on me.”

Shifting your defense against Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz is a no-brainer. He will be a pull hitter until cows fly. But Paulsen is a different beast. If he has any reputation this early in his career, it’s probably about his burly beard.

“I got that hit (in Houston),” Paulsen said, “and the next day I was like, ‘What’s going on here?’ “

The box score from that Rockies game in Phoenix shows that Paulsen lined out to center field. Owings was listed as a second baseman. Ahmed was at shortstop. But what do those terms even mean in big-league baseball now?

“If shifting is going to stick leaguewide, and it becomes part of the vernacular, it might change the way people begin to think about that position,” Rockies general manager Jeff Bridich said this month. He was talking about how to play shortstop — a simple concept for a century. Until now.

The shift isn’t new, but its use has spiked. The Rockies shifted 114 times last season — fewest in the National League. The Washington Nationals, the closest NL team to the Rockies last year in terms of shifting, did it nearly twice as much.

This season the Rockies shifted their defense more in the first month than they did in all of 2014. And through July 5 teams had used 9,495 shifts, according to Baseball Info Solutions via ESPN — already more than the total in 2013 and on pace to shatter the total from 2014. Five years ago teams shifted just 2,464 times.

More shifting is paying dividends for the Rockies, who had 10 defensive runs saved entering Saturday. They had 16 all of last season.

The idea to shift at all — then where to shift and how — is unique to each team. There are spray charts (where batters hit the ball) to consider as well as batting averages on balls in play (BABIP), groundball percentages and opposite-field averages.

The methodology may be murky from an outside view, but the results are clear.

“The numbers show we’ve turned a higher percentage of groundballs into outs,” Rockies manager Walt Weiss said.

Of course, revolutions beget more revolutions. Hitters surely will — and already are — trying to compensate. But in the era of the pitcher, the hitter has another something in his way.

“It’s just one more thing (to deal with),” Paul sen said.

Nick Groke: ngroke@denverpost.com or twitter.com/nickgroke