WASHINGTON D.C., March 17th – Over the past few weeks, I’ve been wading my way through The Book: Playing The Percentages In Baseball, (Ó 2007 by Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman and Andrew Dolphin), also known as the sabermetric gospel. Today I finally got through the line-up optimization chapter, which means that I know believe myself qualified to run the process for the Orioles. I’ll detail my non-number crunching, only-logical method farther down. But first, before I bore everyone to death, I’ll post the optimized lineup.
|
Pos |
Name |
|
LF |
Nolan Reimold |
|
C |
Matt Weiters |
|
CF |
Adam Jones |
|
RF |
Nick Markakis |
|
2B |
Brian Roberts |
|
DH |
Luke Scott |
|
1B |
Garrett Atkins |
|
3B |
Miguel Tejada |
|
SS |
Cesar Izturis |
I seriously doubt Dave Trembley will write that on the opening day lineup card. Anyway, my methodology, along with some qoutes from The Book, is outlined below.
The four main principles are:
1. “Your three best hitters should bat somwhere in the first, second, and fourth slots.”
2. “Your fourth and fifth best hitters should occupy the third and fifth slots”
3. “From sixth to ninth place your remaining hitters from best to worst”
4. “The second leadoff hitter effect does not exist in the AL”
Based on these principles (and a few more which I won’t quote), I used OBP, SLG, wOBA, BB%, and SB% as my focus stats.
Using wOBA, I determined the O’s top three hitters to be Markakis, Reimold, and Wieters, placing them in the prime slots based on OBP/SLG splits. Roberts and Jones were the next best, so I placed them in the fifth and third spots, respectively, based on OBP/SLG split, and speed leveraging. The sixth through nine spots were assigned by order of decreasing wOBA. All the values I used came from the FanGraphs fan projections.
This is obviously a strange-looking lineup, but with the offense the O’s have (outside of their top three/four), and the tough competition in the AL East, it might be worth a try. It’s wacky, but it wouldn’t be any worse than what Baltimore does now.
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