Why aren’t the power hitters distributed throughout the lineup, rather than towards the middle? Wouldn’t there be a potential to generate more runs with the hitters distributed every 2 or 3 batters?
22KE
WAG but I suspect it has to do with not allowing pitchers to “pitch around” strong hitters. If you watch 61* you’ll see the Yankees put Maris before Mantle to get Maris better pitches to hit, for instance.
Wag the 2[sup]nd[/sup]:
Another thing is, the top of your order generally consists of batters who get on base often. Not power hitters, not necessarily even high Batting Average – if you have a guy that can milk the count for a lead-off walk consistently, he’s a good candidate for Leadoff.
Once you have a guy or two on base, that’s when you want your Power batting. Somebody who can get a long single or a double, scoring the lead-off guy from first. Or even getting everybody in on a homer. It ain’t called “Cleanup” for nuttin’.
The bottom of the order is, well, the bottom of the order…
People at the top of the order bat more often since you don’t always go through the lineup and even number of times. You want people who are speedy and have good on base percentage to be on early so the power hitters have them on base. With runners on base, pitching changes, the fielders are in different positions, etc.
You want good batters behind your good hitters so pitchers can’t just walk them and pitch to a schlub for an easy out. For example, the Red Sox have David Ortiz (when he’s not on the DL) followed by Manny Ramirez at #3 and 4. If you have someone like Julio Lugo behind Ortiz then they are much more likely to walk Ortiz and pitch to Lugo. With Manny behind him you can’t walk Ortiz and put a runner on for Manny.
The Sox put Jacoby Ellsbury at the top of the lineup because if he gets on base (walk or hit) he can often steal second and third. That puts him in position to score on a sac fly or grounder. You want him at bat as often as you can, with some hitters behind him to drive him home.
I think somewhere in Moneyball this is discussed, but I don’t have a copy right now. But the bottom line is that grouping the strong hitters works better – remember it usually takes more than one hit (or BB) to get a run, so you’re better off putting your hitters together to generate runs, while giving up on the inning where all your weak hitters bat. I think this holds even without accounting for defensive strategies made possible by interspersing weaker hittters (e.g. walking Bonds to get to the pitcher).
There’s a lot of reasons behind this, actually, and a lot of history.
The general gist of it is that the first inning is the one time you can line up your guys the ideal way, since it’s the only inning you know who’s leading off. So teams will tend to lead off with players who get on base a lot or who are very fast, or ideally both, and then try to drive them in with the team’s finest power hitters. Many teams have been willing to lead off with playerss who didn’t get on base very well but do steal bases well, on the theory that a player who can steal bases represents an easier RBI opportunity for the power hitters. In most cases that doesn’t actually work very well - getting on base is way more important than stealing bases - but certainly, if your choise is between Mr. Slow and Mr. Fast, you want Mr. Fast leading off unless he’s substantially worse than Mr. Slow at getting on base.
Generally speaking, this works; teams usually score more runs in the first inning than any other. However, that’s not so much due to order than it is just that your best hitters will come up in that inning.
Lineup decisions can often be made based on stupidity, too. It was pointed out that for many years the Cubs would bat Ryne Sandberg second and Mark Grace third, even though Grace was usually better at getting on base and Sandberg better at hitting home runs, and that they appeared to be doing this solely because first basemen (like Grace) are USUALLY power hitters, and second basemen (like Sandberg) are usually not. So even though Sandberg was a league home run champion and Grace hit a fraction as many, the archetypes of how those positions usually hit were so strong in Jim Frey’s mind that he batted them in an order that had little regard to their actual abilities.
There has also long been debate as to whether batting your best hitters 3-4-5, as most teams do, is a good idea. There is much evidence to suggest that you would be better off just ordering your hitters from the best to the worst irrespective of their mix of abilities; so the Giants might have been better off hitting Barry Bonds leadoff. This is because every step down in the lineup means you’re getting fewer at bats. Assuming the order always starts with #1, but randomly ends with any spot from 1 to 9 (which isn’t precisely true, but close enough) then every spot you move down in the batting order will cost you 18 at bats in a 162 game season (162 divided by 9 is 18.) So by hitting Barry Bonds fourth, instead of leadoff, the Giants, were giving 54 plate appearances to players other than Barry Bonds, and losing the marginal difference in ability. While the average Giant hitter would go, say, 12-for-47 with five walks and a couple of homers, Bonds would go 13-for-39 with 15 walks and 3 homers. So you lose something in that.
That said, the truth is that in the majors, batting order doesn’t have nearly as much of an impact as people think it does. The marginal difference between batting Bonds first or fourth is quite small, and he was, at his peak, the most extreme case in living memory. Most teams order their lineups in more or less the same fashion. Batting Joe Blow sixth instead of seventh is likely not going to matter. Unless you did stuff that was absolutely insane - the Cardinals batting their pitchers leadoff, and batting Albert Pujols ninth - it’s not really worth getting worked up over.
The precise impact of “bunching” good hitters is a good point, too, but I’ve not seen a study that shows if that works or not.
I’ve also seen a theory that teams should bat the worst hitters 8th instead of 9th, in that a ‘second lead-off’ in the 9 hole sets up the top of your order if he can get on. So for NL teams, the author suggested moving the pitcher to the 8th spot and batting a regular 9th.
OTOH, the '27 Yankees put Ruth before Gehrig.
Tony LaRussa does this pretty frequently with the Cardinals. I don’t know if any other managers do. People talk about it a lot with LaRussa although I don’t recall seeing any articles with data to show if it works better for him or not. That would be interesting to see.
Tony LaRussa is a gigantic asshole who thinks he has a direct pipeline from God on how to manage a baseball team and (with George Fucking Will’s approval) has beguiled much of baseball into buying into this image while he proceeds to destroy the way the game is played. His meddling with one-out pitchers is ruinous to baseball as every other team has blindly followed La Russa in routinely having 12 pitchers on a 25-man roster. He’s a maniac, and I’ll never figure out why his ideas have prevailed as they have. It’s not like he wins World’s Championship after World’s Championship, is it?
There is also a strategy for who you bat 8th (at least in the National League). This is typically a slot for a weak hitter, but a manager should try to put a patient hitter in that slot rather than a free-swinger. The 8th hitter might not see a lot of good pitches, and you want to at least have him take some pitches. Coax a walk, HBP, slap a single–anything to avoid leading off the next inning with the pitcher. At the very least, drive up the pitcher’s pitch count as much as possible.
Problem there is that you want decent OBP guys as early in the lineup as you can afford, so your #8 hitter is by definition going to be your least skilled hitter, often your poorest OBP AND SLG guy. If you’re going to take a decent batter out of the middle (or top) of your order to bat him #8, you’re probably costing yourself some runs.
A mediocre hitter with some speed would be better, maing it that much easier to be bunted over.
Look at it this way: everybody gets 3 plate appearances, minimum.
Every time you get on base (hit, walk, fielder’s choice hit-by-pitch or error, whatever), you buy another appearance at the plate (PA) for someone, starting with the top of the order. If the pitcher gives up 8 hits and 4 walks, everybody gets 4 PAs, but your top 3 guys get 5 PAs. It stands to reason you want the top of the order to be your better hitters.
Also: if you scatter Good hitter, Bad hitter, Good Hitter, Bad Hitter, you allow the defense to walk the Good hitters and set up the double play on the Bad hitters.
LaRussa with the Cardinals:
96 - Goes to Game 7 of NLCS
97 - 4th place in division
98 - 3rd place in division
99 - 4th place in division
00 - Won division
01 - Tied for division lead, went to playoffs as Wild Card
02 - Went to NLCS
03 - 3rd place in division
04 - Went to WS
05 - Went to Game 6 of NLCS
06 - Won WS
07 - 3rd in division
So I don’t see how this has been an unsuccessful run. What kind of results do you demand to prove that something might be working? TLR, Dave Duncan (pitching coach), Walt Jocketty (GM) and Bill DeWitt (managing partner of ownership) were I think the only constants between 96 and 06. None of the players were the same.
He hasn’t exactly been unsuccessful, but it’s hard to review that run and see where he’s taken a well-heeled, highly successful NL franchise (the most successful, last time I looked, in NL history) and taken them to heights of glory, either. To hear George Will (and other LaRussa acolytes) tell it, he’s a fricking genius. One championship in 12 years? He only THINKS he’s a genius–I’d like to buy him for what he’s worth and sell him for what he thinks he’s worth. Me, I think the Cardinals would have been more successful with any available manager, chosen at random.
I don’t care for him, as you may have guessed. I think his drunkenness is a disgrace and his managing so undistinguished that shouldn’t have gotten the pass he got on it. He’s an arrogant thug, IMO.
It’s not quite that simple. One key factor was that Grace was a lefty and Ryno was a righty. At the time conventional wisdom was that alternating lefties and righties, especially in the NL Central, was of greater importance than having a “power hitter” in the 3 hole. Also Grace was glacially slow and Ryno was a reliable base runner and potential base stealer making him a better conventional fit in the 2-spot. Lastly, this was pre-Moneyball where the importance of OBP was not really accepted and Mark Grace was always a better hitter than Ryno as far as batting average was concerns. In the decades before Moneyball it was almost always assumed that your two highest BA guys would bat 3rd and 4th, and that meant Grace would be 3rd and Sosa or Dawson was 4th.
Two other considerations:
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Excepting Barry Bonds and Ted Williams at their very best, the odds of any given at-bat still favor an out. Hence, if we’re assuming there’s a man on base, it makes sense to have TWO good hitters to drive him in.
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Even more importantly, perhaps, is that grouping your good hitters together increases the chance of a multi-run inning. Despite what Joe Morgan says, one-run strategies are not the key to winning.
Exhibit A: 2008 Seattle Mariners. Our “DH” has a BA of 0.215 and our number 9 hitter is at 0.279. I suppose you could argue you want a decent hitter in the 9 spot because if he gets on you have a decent speed on base and a contact and pull hitter in Ichiro up next. But really they consistently trot out lineups that make people cry. Don’t want to get too far of topic but it is hard to me a Mariners fan this year. 
Don’t want to further hijack but IF your DH had a BA of .215 AND a SLG pct. of .600, he’d be doing a good job, and IF your #9 hitter had a BA of .279 and a OBP of .279 and a SLG pct of .279, that would be the only slot I’d consider batting him.
Just saying that BA isn’t all that telling a stat.