THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

One of the things we may not know for another 50 years is how the psychological state of players impacts their performance.  We know that there’s a small benefit to optimizing a lineup in terms of overall runs.  So having Juan Pierre leading off is a bad move, and will cost a few runs over the course of the year.  But does he perform better in the leadoff position, because it validates his belief that his “skills” are valuable to his team?  Would he suck even worse if he was batting 8th, as he probably should be?

So who knows… if bunting with 2 strikes is a small enough hit to WE, maybe the punishment will have a greater positive impact on his performance in the near future.

I can’t think of a way to figure this out besides surveying a bunch of players before each game about their attitudes, and then correlating those attitudes with their performance.  But I’d think you would need a LOT of PAs, at each psychological state, to really have a significant sample.

Reminds me of a somewhat similar situation with Carlos Gomez. A reckless free swinger, he has a habit of falling behind 0-2 in critical situations and striking out on sliders low and away, in the dirt or close to it. Now, everyone in the park has to know that pitch is coming. Gomez has to know it. Gardenhire surely knows it, and he and/or the hitting coach must have talked to Gomez about it (I hope). But time and again, 0-2, critical spot, Gomez flails away at a slider off the plate. Sure, it probably looks like a fastball as it travels to the plate and he reacts instictively, but intellectually he has to know he’s going to see that pitch at 0-2, 1-2, probably 2-2 and even 3-2 until he shows he can lay off it.

A manager could put the take sign on in a situation like that, but it would humiliate the player. It might also drive home the point.

I don’t disagree with either 1 or 2 above.  In fact, one reason why I don’t often rail about batting order is what Mike says above.  Even if there is a tiny chance that a player may be more comfortable in one slot than another, that may be worth as much as the “technically wrong” lineup costs.  Plus, it obviously is important to have speed at the top of the lineup, and that seems to be ignored when people criticize Torre for batting Pierre first.  I doubt that batting Pierre first in the Dodgers lineup makes that much of a difference.  It could even be optimal.  It is really hard to tell unless you run a sim or some kind of a Markov.