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Thursday, March 19, 2009
A word on batting orders
Responding to the primer thread:
So, the mantra “batting order doesn’t matter” is dead now? I’m having trouble keeping up.
The quantitative description is that an optimal batting order can get you 5-15 more runs in a season. (This has been the case since I started looking at this several years ago, and has not changed since.) How you want to qualitatively say that “a little” or “a lot” is up to you. The numeric description is more accurate in any case, and will not change. That’s the only thing you have to keep up with.
Also: remember that moving pitchers from the 8th slot (best) to 4th slot (worst) will cost your team 0.1 runs per game. That’s the breadth of impact in making the single worst decision that no one would ever make.
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Your best hitter should *generally* bat 2nd or 4th. It could happen that he will bat 1st (Rickey, Raines), it could happen that he will bat 3rd. You’d have to look at your entire set of players.
However, it will be very very difficult to find a situation where your five best hitters will not bat somewhere in the top 5. This may seem obvious to everyone here, but I think it’s easy to find teams that put one of their 2 or 3 worst hitters in the 2-hole.
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Also, since star hitters have huge egos, you have to defer to their inner child, as their petulance will easily evaporate the carefully crafted 5-15 run gain you can otherwise hope to get.
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