Team Offense, Cincinnati Reds

The 2015 series on team offense continues with the Cincinnati Reds. The Reds finished twenty eighth in the majors and thirteenth in the the National League in 2014 with 3.67 runs scored per game.

RotoChamp and USA Today disagreed on where Brandon Phillips will bat in the Reds order. He seems to be batting higher up in spring training, so I went with RotoChamp. That Bryan Price lineup is plugged into the Lineup Analysis Tool (LAT) using Musings Marcels as the batter projections. For the pitchers, the actual averages for the Reds staff from 2014 was used. That information produces the following results:

Best lineup: 4.35 runs per game
Probable lineup: 4.12
Worst lineup: 3.73
Regressed lineup: 3.89

The LAT produces some very good lineups with Billy Hamilton, Todd Frazier, and Joey Votto 1-2-3, but just in the reverse order. Votto is so much better than anyone else on the team, the LAT puts him lead-off so he gets the most plate appearances. Joey has been batting second in some games this spring, and doesn’t mind doing so. The default lineup has him followed by Devin Mesoraco, and the best LAT lineups have them 1-2.

Like a number of teams studied, the rest of the players are pretty interchangeable. So you see Phillips, for example, batting third, seventh, sixth, and ninth in the top 30 lineups. Price needs to get Votto as many plate appearances as possible, and not worry too much about the rest of the offense. Keeping Votto healthy will be more important than any particular batting order for this team.

You can follow the data for the series in this Google spreadsheet.

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Previous posts in this series:

March 29, 2015

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