While managers have made a lot of changes over the years in how they use their starting and relief pitchers, the basic batting order has changed very little for many decades. Here is a stereotypical lineup for the American League that all teams follow pretty closely:
#1 in the batting order: Fast guy who gets on base a lot and has little power.
#2: Usually doesn't get on base as much as #1, but has a little more power, though not as much as #3.
#3: The best overall hitter, has a lot of power.
#4: The best or second-best power hitter, but usually doesn't hit and/or walk as often #3.
#5: A power hitter who wasn't good enough to be #3 or #4. The DH is usually #4 or #5.
#6: A good all-around hitter, who isn't good enough to be #2.
#7: A weaker hitter unless the team is pretty deep. Maybe a very good defensive guy.
#8: Often times the worst hitter on the team. Most catchers are #7 or #8.
#9: Little or no power, but can get on a base. A poor-man's #1.
The National League is pretty much identical for the first two thirds of the order. Since the pitcher hits, that changes the bottom of the order a bit.
As mentioned before, I would estimate 98% of managers have followed this method at all levels of baseball since... well, since before the Dodgers left Brooklyn. If you asked an old-school manager for a rudimentary explanation of their batting order, I believe it would go something like this, "#3 and #4 are our best hitters, they drive in runs. We put our fast guys with good batting averages ahead of them so they can get on base, and then #3 and #4 can drive them in." Or so the thinking goes for many baseball traditionalists.
Is this the best approach? Let's examine some statistical scenarios (Yes, that would be three points for alliteration if this was a game of Scattegories!). First off, I will get this out of the way: the RBI is a bogus, out-dated statistic. The amount of RBIs a player accumulates is largely dependent on their spot in the batting order and the situations that person is put in. You can take a mediocre hitter, put him in the sweet spot of the lineup (#3/#4), and he will get a fair amount of RBIs. This is analogous to the way a mediocre reliever can be used as a closer, and they will get a fair amount of saves, but I digress. We should not look at the RBI as a true measure of a player's worth or where they should be place in the batting order.
In the aforementioned lineup model, it appears the driving force of determining the order is sequencing. Put some players who get a lot of hits first, so some players who hit a lot of doubles and home runs can hit them in afterward, and so on. But this sequence-only approach is ignoring the more important effect of a batting order: the amount of at-bats a player receives. The higher up a player in the batting order is, the more often they will get five at-bats in a game instead of four. Or six at-bats instead of five. The end result of these extra at bats over the course of a full-season are overwhelming. Shouldn't the best hitter on a team be given the chance to get the most at-bats, and the second best hitter given the second best chance?
This brings up another tough question regarding how we determine who is the best hitter. Many baseball experts will debate indefinitely that a certain statistic or group of stats best evaluates a hitter. For the purpose of this discussion, I will use the Moneyball-approach that OBP is the best indicator of a hitter's value. If you buy into the thought that the main objective of a hitter is to NOT make an out, and that OBP is literally an indicator of how often a player does NOT make an out, then it isn't too much of a stretch to use OBP to evaluate hitters compared to each other to determine the best.
Therefore, if players closest to the top of the order get the most at-bats, and you presumably want the best hitters to bat the most, then the ideal batting order would simply be to rank players by their OBP in descending order. How does this play out in the real-world? Let's look at an example:
The Milwaukee Brewers used Ryan Braun (OBP .397) as the #3 hitter and Prince Fielder (OBP .415) as the #4 hitter during the vast majority of the 2011 season. Both Fielder and Braun had terrific seasons at the plate, and were considered two of the best hitters in all of baseball (If the rumors turn out to be true and Ryan Braun violated MLB's drug policy, then he should not be considered a good hitter. He would just be a cheating loser in that case.). Despite this undeniably productive pair, manager Ron Roenicke slotted weaker hitters ahead of these two all season long. The #1 and #2 spots in the batting order were filled in by guys like Corey Hart (.356 OBP) Rickie Weeks (.350 OBP) and Carlos Gomez (.276 OBP). These inferior players literally stole many at-bats from Fielder and Braun due to poor managing.
How many additional at-bats would Braun and Fielder have gained had the manager put the best hitters at the top of the order? It is a little difficult to do that math since the hitters above them kept changing due to injuries and lineup changes. So let's examine a team that had a more consistent batting order and that I followed very closely. Juan Pierre played in 158 games for the White Sox last year, had the #1 spot in almost every game he played, and received 639 at-bats. Paul Konerko played in 149 games the same year, was in the #3 or #4 spot every time, and received only 543 at-bats. It doesn't take advanced mathematics to see that even though Konerko played in only 9 fewer games, he had nearly 100 fewer at-bats. How much better would the White Sox have done if their best hitter had an extra fifty at-bats or so? How many times did the Brewers lose with a guy like Carlos Gomez striking out to end the game, while Ryan Braun was waiting in the on-deck and never had a chance to help? Keep in mind, since we are only considering OBP in this exercise, we have completely ignored the fact that a #4 hitter like Fielder not only gets out less often, but when he does get on base, he hits a heck of a lot more doubles and home runs and therefore also has a much higher SLG, OPS and similar stats than a #1 hitter such as Weeks. So not only do these hitters get on base more, but they get into scoring position more often and score themselves more often.
I know the skeptics out there are by now thinking, "But if you put a guy like Fielder at the top of the order, he's going to be batting more often with fewer guys on base." That is absolutely true, a player in the #1 spot is guaranteed to start the game with the bases empty. Also, with the worse OBP guys at the bottom of the order, it is less likely they will be on base for him when he bats later in the game. But I believe most of that loss is negated by the other-side of that effect: Now, the guy who gets on base most-often has the guy batting behind him who is the next most-often hitter to get on base. So your #1 and #2 guys are going to come around to score a lot more often than they would if they were batting #3 or #4. Don't you believe having your second, third and fourth-best OBP guys hitting after your best OBP gets on base is going to score you more runs than if your best OBP guy was followed by some of your weakest hitters and worst-OBP hitters such as #5, #6 and #7? If not, even the strictest old-timer should concede that the extra 40 at-bats or more for the best hitter would more than off-set the loss.
So should the best hitter be in the #1 spot in the batting order? Should the next best always be #2? I think it is safe to say that this method would produce far better results than the stereotypical #3 and #4 hitter that baseball has today. If you still disagree, I will leave you with this one final example from last year. The 2011 Red Sox were a very good team who played terrible in September and just missed making the playoffs. Jacob Ellsbury played in 158 games, all in the #1 spot, and received 660 at-bats. Adrian Gonzalez played one more game than Ellsbury (159), yet received 30 fewer at bats (630). If Gonzalez had been in the #1 spot instead of the #3 spot all year, how many more times would he have gotten a base hit with all of those extra at-bats? Could he have hit a few more home runs? Could those additional hits have been the difference between Red Sox Nation celebrating in the post-season and not? I encourage someone to try and demonstrate otherwise.
No comments:
Post a Comment