Here I was hoping I'd found one more reason to make fun of Tony La Russa, and you have to go ruin it.

Sorry David, but you haven't convinced me. Plus you a leap in logic without backing it up. You write:

"A decent hitter batting ninth gives the 1-2-3 hitters more opportunities to drive in runs"

While of course that's true, is it statistically significant? How many more opportunities to drive in runs would the 1-2-3 hitters see, over the course of a season, if you assume that the 9th place hitter is your former 8th place hitter? Do those opportunities offset the additional plate appearances by the worst hitter in the lineup?

One thing that hasn't been mentioned is that regardless of how many extra PA the the 8th position would yield over the 9th, in the NL, the manager tends to pinch-hit for the pitcher by the end of the game, when such a situation occurs. Thus, over a season, the pitchers should really see at most a slight uptick in PA - for those teams with strong starters who can throw complete games.

For hook happy managers - which LaRussa has tended to be, he had the 4th most quick hooks in the NL according to Bill James Handbook, and the second least long outings for starters - the number of times the pitcher pitches well enough to get that extra PA will be few.

Meanwhile, you provide extra PA's for 3 of your best hitters - 1/2/3 - to drive in runs because you have a better hitter batting 9th. Even for the worse OBP hitters - down in the low .300's - that is still a 40-50% improvement in OBP from the pitcher.

Is it significant? I don't think that's been proven. Is it an improvement over batting the pitcher 9th? I think that has been shown.

That seems like another giant leap of logic, though. How can you assume that the first place hitter is going to get on base more simply because the 9th place hitter does? You can't. All you can say is that having a better hitter hitting ninth leads to more PAs by the 1st place hitter.....NOT the top three hitters as you suggest.

And this of course leaves out the fact that the new 9th place hitter will have less PAs than he did batting 8th and the pitcher more.