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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.
I sometimes feel there’s a bit of double think about line up order among Sabermetric types. We’re happy to say that the difference between Martin Prado and Michael young was worth about $4.5 million dollars last year, but then when it comes to line up order, we talk like one win is chump change. Line up order is low cost stuff, and while the difference between Tex and A-Rod as 3/4 or 4/3 is probably too small to quibble over, there are a lot of teams that could squeeze a few runs out of their line up. I think constructing a line up around R/L SP is probably not done enough. (Mostly by moving #2 down and putting more good hitters at the top.)
If I were the manager, I think I would start spring training telling the team that we were going to have more flexible line ups this year, that we were going to build the line up around each batter-pitcher match up, and that we were going to take platoon effects pretty seriously, so part of everyone’s job in spring training is to get used to hitting in different spots in the line up. I’d probably come right out and say “the guy who hits number two has to have a lot of confidence from me, because he’s getting the second most trips to the plate, so if I pencil you in at #2, feel good about yourself.” It seems to me like the manager’s job to make every run count and to get as many runs out of his team as possible.