Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
December 09, 2007
Royals Lineup

Trey Hillman discusses his thoughts on the Royals lineup:

Sure, spring training is still more than two months away, and the roster could still undergo some major changes before the Royals convene in Surprise, Ariz. Also, Hillman's evaluations, he acknowledges, are culled primarily from scrutinizing DVDs.

None of that matters, does it?

Not to Hillman, whose initial plans include keeping David DeJesus in the leadoff role, anchoring Jose Guillen as the cleanup hitter and having Alex Gordon bat seventh.

That puts Gordon, Hillman insists, in an often-undervalued role.

"That seven hole seems to come up a lot in inning-ending situations," Hillman said. "If he makes an out, that just crushes you because you've got eight, nine and one in the next inning.

"You don't want the one guy coming up with the possibility of being the third out in an inning. I want to get to that No. 8 guy (the previous inning) so we can get to No. 2. You want to grind it out so you can get back and turn (the lineup) over again.

Batting with two out comes up just about as often for the six and eight hitters. Starting with the 2000 season, number six hitters saw 33.0% of their plate appearances with two out, number seven hitters 33.4%, number eight hitters 33.2%. It strike me there's a bit of flawed logic here. If you want your lineup to turn over often, then you want to get the most PA to your high OBA hitters. The fewer outs they make, the more every one else gets to hit. Number six hitters come to bat 2.8% more than number seven hitters, so getting Gordon more AB in the six hole should extend the offense just as well.

From the article, here's how Hillman's lineup looks (I'm assuming Gload bats sixth). It's a good lineup, scoring 5.013 runs per game. The best lineup for this group of players scores 5.104 per game, and there's only a 0.3 run difference between the best and worst lineup Hillman can construct. If you flip Gordon and Gload, it makes no difference.


Posted by David Pinto at 10:19 AM | Strategy | TrackBack (0)
Comments

Actually, it's not a good lineup; the White Sox score 5.3 runs a game using the same kinds of assumptions, the Tigers almost six.

Posted by: doug at December 9, 2007 12:14 PM
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