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Lineup position value

iramets Feb 08 2007 06:19 AM

Now that we know where every Met batted in the order on UMDB, can we use that info to state each batter's ability at least as perceived by their managers? For starters, does anyone disagree with the following ranking of the order of importance of each batting slot? Most important to least important: 3 4 5 1 2 6 7 8 9 Does anyone think the leadoff hitter is more important than the #5 hitter? Can we agree on an order, or is this a hopeless discussion?

Johnny Dickshot Feb 08 2007 07:01 AM

Wouldn't you put 1 and 2 ahead of 5?

iramets Feb 08 2007 07:06 AM

Dunno. You saying you'd go 341256789?

Johnny Dickshot Feb 08 2007 07:22 AM

My inclination is to go 123456789 But, yeah, 3 first. Maybe 314256789

Edgy DC Feb 08 2007 08:18 AM

I'm of a 314256789 mindset also, with some love for switching 1 and 4 and/or 2 and 5. I sure wouldn't cringe if David Wright was batting second instead of Lo Duca, as well as he did.

Nymr83 Feb 08 2007 11:46 AM

i'd go 314256789 or 341256789....i think everyone can agree that "6789" are the last four.... i'm not sure why anyone would put 5 ahead of 1. i could easily be convinced on 1-9 simply because you want your best hitters getting the most plate appearences. if i'm constructing my lineup i'm looking to get my best overall hitter to the plate with men on base, but i'm also looking to get him as many PA as possible (which is why i bat him 3rd not 5th) i'm looking to get men on base to start thegame so i'd want my two highest OBPs batting 1-2 unless those players are already being used to bat 3-4. based solely on the presumption that everyone will repeat their 2006 OBP/SLG numbers i'd have the following lineup: Reyes, Wright, Beltran, Delgado, Alou, LoDuca, Valentin, Green.

Edgy DC Feb 08 2007 11:58 AM

] i'm not sure why anyone would put 5 ahead of 1. Maybe, but most (not all) of us would agree that David Wright is a superior offendor to Jose Reyes and Willie Randolph puts him at five and Reyes at one. On a team that's not fooling around.

iramets Feb 08 2007 12:57 PM

Five is a pretty serious hitter. Think Daryl Strawberry on the '86 team. He usually hit 5, I think, and was considered far more important than Mookie to that team's offense.

iramets Feb 08 2007 01:04 PM

Nymr83 wrote: i could easily be convinced on 1-9 simply because you want your best hitters getting the most plate appearences. First, I want a shot at convincing you that I have some money in a Nigerian bank that I'm willing to share with an American who can front me some small sums to bribe Nigerian banking officials with, okay?

metsmarathon Feb 08 2007 04:45 PM

i'm not sure if this is relevant in any way, seeing as i'm not sure that i understand the question sufficiently... but that's never stopped me before... i just decided to look at the contribution of all the batting order spots (1-9) in terms of OPS, and compared that to the runs scored for each team. what i found was that, across the majors in 2006, 4-hitters are responsible for the most offense, followed by 5-hitters and 3-hitters. 2- and 5- are virtually tied, followed closely by 1- then 7- 8- and especially 9--hitters are responsible for the least offense. what does this all mean? nothing, aside from that i get bored, and subsequently distracted, easily.

Edgy DC Feb 08 2007 04:56 PM

Then we get to the thorny challenge of tacking basestealing productivity onto batting productivity, and blah-blah.

metsmarathon Feb 08 2007 05:21 PM

i think the most important question about this thread is "what do you mean by important?" do you mean which spot in the order is it most vital that you fill it with the archetypical hitter (speedy on base guy hitting leadoff, contact hitter in the two, good all-around in three, slugger with good obp in four, slugger with lesser obp in five, and so on and so forth)? or do you mean which spot fdo you put your bestest hitter in, and so on and so forth? because if we're ignoring the archetypes, and are just going by some nebulous quality of bestest, then i'd default to put my bestest guy 4th in the order, then 3,5,2,1,6,7,8,9

iramets Feb 08 2007 05:41 PM

I think the question is "What do WE think is important?"--we being MLB, its fans and managers, sportwriters, etc. If batting order is utterly irrelevant, then it's a no-brainer: since the leadoff batter gets up more, bat your best hitter leading off, no matter what, even if he's Mark McQwire or Harmon Killebrew. Historically, of course, I think you'll find otherwise. Ranked in order of OPS, I would have thought the #3 hitter would be the best hitter. So your assertion that the cleanup guy has a better OPS is, right off, turning that convention (or cliche) around a little. I wonder if it's a more subtle pattern like the 1-3 spots are your best OBP hitters, placed in rising order of SLG, and your 4-6 guys are your best remaining SLG guys, placed in declining order of OBP, adjusted for breaking up clusters of L and R batters, or something like that. Maybe the question I'm posing is this: if you had 8 switchhitting regulars with roughly the same OPS, but differing SLG and OBP, how would you make up the lineup? Or maybe that's another question altogether.

metsmarathon Feb 08 2007 07:03 PM

see, if we're looking at "most important" then the interesting analysis would be if you had 9 players with identical SLG/OBP ratios, but differing OPS, where would yo bat the best hitter? or are you asking, "is having a great cleanup hitter more important to a team than having a great leadoff hitter?"

iramets Feb 08 2007 07:57 PM

metsmarathon wrote: see, if we're looking at "most important" then the interesting analysis would be if you had 9 players with identical SLG/OBP ratios, but differing OPS, where would yo bat the best hitter? or are you asking, "is having a great cleanup hitter more important to a team than having a great leadoff hitter?" How about if I just tell you where I started and you can helpme out from there? I was looking over Cleon Jones's batting order positions, and wondering if I would be more impressed if he batted cleanup more or #3 more. Then I asked myelf, "Which would say better things about Jones' ability? Which would say worse things about the way Met managers chose to employ Jones' anbility?" When I think of Jones I think "Pure # 3 guy": not enough power for the 4 hole, plus too much speed considering that they always had a Swoboda or a Kranepool or a Shamsky or a Clendenon or someone more powerful than Jones but slower to bat behind him, yet he also had too much power to have him batting leadoff ...but he batted out of the #3 hole more than I would have thought. Likewise Mex--why would you EVER bat him anywhere besides the 3 hole?--but people did.

Edgy DC Feb 08 2007 08:03 PM

Well, yeah, but not with the Mets until 1989 when his game was falling apart.

iramets Feb 08 2007 08:40 PM

Edgy DC wrote: Well, yeah, but not with the Mets until 1989 when his game was falling apart. Good trivia quetsion here, I think. Not sure of the form: How many times in his Met career did Hernandez bat cleanup? (Too tricky?) or What's the Met record for consecutive games starting (in games he did start) in the same lineup slot? I wonder if Keith is the answer to this one. A tricky answer might be "Seaver" but it looks like Keith had close to 800 starts where he batted #3, far more starts than Seaver had as a Met. Any other nominees come to mind? It doesn't look like Rey batted 8th more than maybe 200 straight starts.

iramets Feb 08 2007 08:59 PM

Likewise Piazza had no more than about 200 consecutive starts (of those he started) at cleanup. In a way, this is what I'm hoping to be able to quantify--how much more important Piazza was to the Mets' offense than Ordonez, or if Cleon can be found by this method to have been more key than Agee. Did Bobby consider Olerud more important than Ventura? Stuff like that..

iramets Feb 08 2007 09:03 PM

Ed K. started games at slots 1-8. That's pretty rare, I'd guess.

iramets Feb 08 2007 09:49 PM

Another way to think of what I'm looking for is a way to use lineup slots as an offensive equivalent of Bill James' Defensive Spectrum, where you can't "average out" defensive value by where the positions are on the actual field but rather in terms of value. So if a guy played half his games at 2B and half at 3B, you wouldnt say that he was on average a SS, because SS is harder than both 2b and 3b. In much the same way, a guy like Bud Harrelson who basically batted leadoff and #8, wouldn't average out to a valuable middle of the order guy, but rather what you'd see from his slots is that he ranks sorta poorly as an offensive player. (More poorly than the slots would suggest, since he only batted at the top out of his managers' desperation, wish-fulfilment, plus some early illusion/potential of pop, and some OBP and running speed possibilities. But basically he was a perfect #8 guy, who somehow got a few hundred games at leadoff and #2 because his teams lacked pop Even then Buddy NEVER batted 3, 4, 5, or 6 in a dozen seasons as a Met. Not once.

Nymr83 Feb 08 2007 11:06 PM

]In much the same way, a guy like Bud Harrelson who basically batted leadoff and #8, wouldn't average out to a valuable middle of the order guy, but rather what you'd see from his slots is that he ranks sorta poorly as an offensive player all this would show, for any player, is the manager's perception of their offensive contributions, not what they were actually worth or where t hey should have actually batted in an ideal order.

iramets Feb 09 2007 03:55 AM

Nymr83 wrote: all this would show, for any player, is the manager's perception of their offensive contributions. Of course. No one is pretending the lineups come from anywhere other than the player's managers. But when you play for several managers, as Buddy did, and they all do the same things with you, that's gotta tell you something. I'm trying to figure out what that something is. I don't think it's just' "some nutty manager's whims."

metsmarathon Feb 09 2007 11:16 AM

of course, buddy was never close to the best hitter on his team, and therefore there would never be a situation where a manager would have to evaluate whether or not buddy's particular skills were better suited to the middle of the order, as opposed to the top or the bottom. ] Even then Buddy NEVER batted 3, 4, 5, or 6 in a dozen seasons as a Met. Not once. [url=http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/bsplit.cgi?n1=harrebu01]baseballreference.com [/url]shows that indeed bud had batted 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th in his career, and all as a met. granted, he never STARTED a game in that spot, but certainly had some plate appearances as a pinch hitter. :P

iramets Feb 09 2007 12:00 PM

That certainly wins today's silly nit-pick prize. I'm sure situations arose when you don't want a bopper at the plate and would rather have a weak-hitting (but good bunting) player batting for your bopper. SFW? Does that advance some kind of argument I made? I'm also sure that Buddy was pinchitting for some relief pitchers who found themselves batting in the middle of the order--again, does that show that a manager actually considered Buddy a middle of the order batter? Of course not.

metsmarathon Feb 09 2007 02:19 PM

woohoo! first six schaeffer points for the periodic table, then the unoficcial win in the free agent prediciton game, and now today's silly nit-pick prize! i am so on a roll. there was no point to my post. i just noticed something and decided to point it out. i was actually hoping he had a start in there, but only so's i could look at what would only have been the worst lineup in the history of ever, or at least something very very close to it.

iramets Feb 09 2007 02:35 PM

It's a rare honor, the nit-pick award. And the periodic table thing was great. I wrote something about the periodic table and specifically Antimony once--it was a memoir about peeping into the girls' dorm with binoculars and noticing (we were pre-Meds, so forgive our nerdiness) that the windows roughly corresponded to the proportions of the table. All a peeper had to do was shout out "Argon!" or "Mendelevium!" and a crowd of horny pre-meds would put down their books and stare at the appropriate window. One night, I responded to a call for "Antimony!" and discovered that I and all my friends were gaping at my ex-girlfriend walking around in her new dorm room wearing her panties and maybe an ankle bracelet. Anyway, I wanted to offer a game, if you're not dismissing me merely as a pervert at this point. I'll offer a question about Mets lineup issues, and you (without looking at the UMDB) will guess the correct answers. (It will help me get the correct answers if we could somehow get "lifetime" numbers on the UMDB--which would involve adding up all the numbers that are there now, of course. Yancy, is there a chance of seeing that in our lifetimes?) First question-- There are at least three Mets who've batted in every lineup slot from 1-8--name them. (I'm sure there are more than three--I found three in fifteen minutes of cruising last night. But name 'em and I'll check if you're right.) Go.

Yancy Street Gang Feb 09 2007 02:56 PM

iramets wrote: It will help me get the correct answers if we could somehow get "lifetime" numbers on the UMDB--which would involve adding up all the numbers that are there now, of course. Yancy, is there a chance of seeing that in our lifetimes?) I'm not sure exactly what you're asking here.

Edgy DC Feb 09 2007 02:57 PM

Kranepool Agbayani Shinjo

iramets Feb 09 2007 03:22 PM

Yancy Street Gang wrote: ="iramets"]It will help me get the correct answers if we could somehow get "lifetime" numbers on the UMDB--which would involve adding up all the numbers that are there now, of course. Yancy, is there a chance of seeing that in our lifetimes?) I'm not sure exactly what you're asking here. Totals for the season lineup numbers. Please.

iramets Feb 09 2007 03:29 PM

Edgy DC wrote: Kranepool Agbayani Shinjo Good one. Two of 'em did it in short careers, too. I've still got two more, though. No one? Would you like a hint?

metsmarathon Feb 09 2007 04:15 PM

agee

iramets Feb 09 2007 04:25 PM

Yes, I can't imagine why you'd ever want to bat Agee 6th, but Hodges did, nine times, and then Yogi committed that move once. Still got two for yous. Both long-time 3b men.

Johnny Dickshot Feb 09 2007 04:28 PM

The Fonz. Red.

iramets Feb 09 2007 04:40 PM

Johnny Dickshot wrote: The Fonz. Red. Both correct, though Red hated being called "Red," absolutely hated it, and Fonzie made the list surprisingly late in his career, not batting cleanup until his penultimate year, when he hit 4th one time. The final year, he batted cleanup several more times, but I would have thought he'd batted 4th much earlier. There's still one more 3b man who started at slots 1-8, though.

iramets Feb 09 2007 05:22 PM

Actually, there are several more. For some reason the all slots guys gravitate to 3b, and to RF, overwhelmingly Agee Agbayani Cameron Jim Hickman Shinjo Johnny Lewis Cleon Jones Kranepool Edgardo Alfonzo Wayne Garrett HoJo Charlie Smith Joel Youngblood Hubie Brooks These 14 guys are the only ones I've found so far who started in 1-8 holes. Which of them strikes you as unlikeliest ever to have batted in which slot? My vote's gotta go to Ed the K batting leadoff. I'll never get over that one.