Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
February 25, 2006
Filling a Request

There were a couple of requests in regards to last night's lineup analysis to change the program so it would calculate the runs per game for a given lineup. Having looked at the code, it wasn't tough to do. So now if you enter an actual lineup, it gives you the runs per game for that batting order before the best and worst tables. You can try it here.


Posted by David Pinto at 03:14 PM | Strategy | TrackBack (0)
Comments

Very nifty. You might want to increase your bandwidth. I have the feeling this will be very very big.

Posted by: pawnking at February 25, 2006 04:03 PM

This confirms most intuitive lineup analyses. The one surprising thing is that OBP matters the least for the #6 spot in the order. Can anyone explain why that would be so?

Posted by: Keith at February 25, 2006 04:32 PM

The people coming up behind you are not likely to have the power to drive you in. Therefore, power to drive in runners ahead of you is more important than setting the table.

Posted by: David Pinto at February 25, 2006 04:35 PM

Before seeing this, I had thought a Loretta/Youkilis/Ramirez/Ortiz/Nixon/Varitek/Lowell/Crisp/Gonzalez lineup would be best for the Sox this year. But, according to the script (and my estimates of OBP & SLG), that would only yield 5.41 runs/game. The best lineup (Y/R/V/O/N/Lowell/C/G/Loretta) yields 5.566 runs/game, or 25.3 more runs in a full season. That could easily make the difference in a tight division or wild card race.

See http://people.csail.mit.edu/jrennie/baseball/ for the numbers I used.

Posted by: Jason at February 25, 2006 07:04 PM

Fun, but ultimately stupid and meaningless. A player's OBP and SLG is affected by where he bats in the batting order, so plugging the numbers into a formula is useless for analyzing anything.

Posted by: RealityChuck at February 26, 2006 12:03 AM

Fun, but ultimately stupid and meaningless. A player's OBP and SLG is affected by where he bats in the batting order, so plugging the numbers into a formula is useless for analyzing anything.

Would you care to back up that statement with some research? OBP might be affected due to IBBs if the hitter behind you is much weaker (e.g. 8th spot in the NL), but that's about it. Remember that studies have only demonstrated the existence of weak protection; strong protection doesn't seem to exist.

Posted by: BosoxBob at February 27, 2006 08:21 PM
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