Baseball Strategy:Does lineup order matter?
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Lineup Order Doesn’t Make A Whole Lot Of Difference.
Managers, fans, and the media are generally obsessed with batting order: ‘Does he hit better in the number 3 spot or at cleanup?’... ‘They should really give this guy more protection!’... ‘He likes it better in the 9 spot, where he can be like a second lead-off man.’ ... The simple truth is, though, that lineup order is not all that significant. Over the years, managers have intuitively figured out nearly the optimum way of organizing a lineup, such that any scientifically-derived lineup (like ordering by OBP) wouldn’t add that many more runs.
Lineup “protection” is another overrated concept, as the difference between any two players (non-pitchers) in a lineup are likely so small that pitchers are only hurting their team by pitching around batters. Furthermore, intentional walks are almost always a bad decision for the same reason -- unless the pitcher is on deck, the next batter will not offer enough of a drop-off in ability to offset the fact that you just put a man on base for free.
The only thing that is significant about batting order is that your leadoff man must be good at getting on base. Bill James once found that the single biggest contributing factor to how many runs a team scores in an inning is how often the leadoff man gets on base; since you can determine who the leadoff man is in at least the first inning of every game, it is advantageous to put a player with a high OBP (as in, not Jose Reyes) in the leadoff spot. However, one PA per game won’t add that many runs to a team in the long run. Hence, all of the teeth-gnashing over lineup order is largely a waste of time, time that could be spent on more important matters... like figuring out how to get Bill Plaschke fired.
