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Correction: The original version of this post missed the tie with Seattle.
The 2015 series on team offense continues with the Boston Red Sox. The Red Sox finished tied for eighteenth in the majors and tied for eleventh in the the American League in 2014 with 3.91 runs scored per game. To two decimal places, they averaged the same as the Mariners and Yankees, but the Red Sox and Mariners scored one more run than New York.
I could not find updated lineups at CBSSports.com, so I am going to use a combination of RotoChamp and USA Today. The RotoChamp lineup with Mookie Betts looks like a better bet for the Boston lineup. That John Farrell lineup is plugged into the Lineup Analysis Tool (LAT) using Musings Marcels as the batter projections. That information produces the following results:
Best lineup: 5.04 runs per game
Probable lineup: 4.99
Worst lineup: 4.80
Regressed lineup: 4.55
There is only a 0.24 run difference between the best and the worst Red Sox lineups, so it’s tough for Farrell to make a mistake. As with the Rangers, the worst lineup would be a huge improvement over the 2014 squad. There’s also enough young players in the lineup to offer upside to the possible downside of some of the veterans. The Boston front office did a great job of re-configuring the lineup.
Note that Farrell gets the one, eight, and nine slots correct, and only Mike Napoli is more than one slot away from the ideal. Farrell has his best hitters concentrated at the top, his worst at the bottom, and his good ones in between. He also recognizes Christian Vazquez as a second lead-off man and bats him ninth. It’s an extremely well constructed batting order.
You can follow the data for the series in this Google spreadsheet.
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Previous posts in this series:
- Introduction
- Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim
- Detroit Tigers
- Colorado Rockies
- Oakland Athletics
- Toronto Blue Jays
- Los Angeles Dodgers
- Minnesota Twins
- Baltimore Orioles
- Washington Nationals
- Pittsburgh Pirates
- Cleveland Indians
- San Francisco Giants
- Chicago White Sox
- Kansas City Royals
- Milwaukee Brewers
- Miami Marlins
- Texas Rangers
Not that you don’t have enough to do, but I’d like to see a simple 3-column chart showing each team and best, worst, probable, so I can easily compare.
I’d also like to see you go back to previous years and show us how well you did in your preseason scoring predictions.
Can you have that for us by, say, the weekend?
Tom Andersen » There is a link to the spreadsheet in each post. In the introduction, there is a spreadsheet to previous years.
Thanks! I always skip the intro, assuming it’s just boilerplate.