Lineups: Part 1

Constructing baseball lineups seems to be an area of optimization that is often neglected at both the major league and college levels. In Parts 1 and 2, I'm going to take a look at the prevailing wisdom concerning batting order (note: wisdom, not tradition). In Part 3, I'll speculate on what an ideal Seminole lineup might have looked like last year and project what kind of optimized lineup the 'Noles could (but probably won't) trot out come opening day. Let's start by looking at the most frequently deployed lineup from the 2008 season.

Batter AVG/OBP/ SLG
1. Tyler Holt .324/.471/.416
2. Jason Stidham .322/.430/.518
3. Buster Posey .463/.566/.879!
4. Jack Rye .371/.478/.526
5. Dennis Guinn .322/.430/.641
6. Tony Delmonico .374/.455/.529
7. Tommy Oravetz .361/.456/.550
8. Mike McGee .344/.427/.544
9. Stuart Tapley .383/.472/.592

Now, this is not a bad collection of hitters. It scored an obscene amount of runs last year (663 in 68 games). It won games with monster homeruns and it won them with "small ball" and timely hitting. But could it be better? Could the performance of the batting order be maximized? Well, there are 24 possible base/out states in the game of baseball- ranging from no men on base, no men out to bases loaded with two outs. By tracking the scoring outcomes of each base/out state, we can come up with a Run Expectancy (RE) for each of them. By comparing the RE before and after any event, we can assign the event itself a value in runs. An out leads to a lower Run Expectancy for the inning, but putting men on base or moving batters over leads to a greater RE. Of course it's actually more complicated than that (which is why people can argue about whether bunts are stupid or not until they're blue in the face), but there you have the basics.

So how is this useful? Well, each spot in the order sees certain base/out states more than others. It follows that certain events (causing a change in run expectancy) are more valuable to one batting spot than the other. On the simplest level, this is why you don't want your most powerful hitter batting last in the order behind your typically worst batters. Your slugger won't see many situations with men on base here if the aformentioned men kinda stink at getting on base. His homeruns and extra base hits just don't mean nearly as much here as they would in the 4 or 5 spot. Well, it looks like Coach Martin had the right idea, we've got our 3 most powerful hitters in the 3, 4, and 5 spots. But is there something being left on the table? Could we have made better use of all the great hitters on this team?

I'll provide some more details and simple critical analysis in Part 2...