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Monday, February 28, 2011
Batting orders: fix what’s broken
I agree with Girardi, generally:
No matter who hits where, most analysis says the same thing: unless a manager does something dramatically wrongheaded, like batting his best hitter 9th, most lineup tweaks don’t make much of a difference. From a statistical sense, studies have shown that lineup optimization leads to perhaps one extra win per season.
While a little more production might be squeezed out of his league-leading lineup, Girardi seems conscious that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
“You know you have your middle-of-the-order hitters and then you have your guys who are going to be your supporting cast,” he said. “How we kind of divvy up that supporting cast remains to be seen. But our lineup scored lot of runs last year, a lot of runs last year. And maybe we tweak it and maybe we don’t.”
Not so much his reasoning here, but elsewhere, he said he had to manage them as people and if he moves players around, the players may think something of it.
I agree that because you only gain a couple of runs for each switch you make, that that gain might be eroded if someone is thinking about “does he still love me? what did I do wrong? why won’t he call” lineup drama.
It would be great if players simply did not treat the lineup slot as status. But, perhaps because they DO treat it as status, it gives them more confidence.
And so, teams should play up that the #2 slot in the batting order is very important. As it stands, it’s treated as “oh, not good enough to be a leadoff hitter and not good enough to be a #5 hitter, eh?”. And so, it’s self-defeating.
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