Batting order in baseball

The Game Room
1

I was reading a thread elsewhere about baseball earlier, and someone was saying that some NY Yankees player had been shafted by continually being given the third or fourth slot. Might have been that “A-Rod” guy. I don’t really understand why that would be a bad thing.

Seems to me that having a few good batters in a row would be a good idea, as you’re more likely to achieve the statistical oddity of a few players in a row getting hits and thus RBIs before three guys get out to end the innings. And it would probably be a good idea to have those guys at the top of the order, simply because they’re going to have more opportunities to bat. But other than that I don’t understand the rhyme or reason behind a guy batting first in the order or ninth.

I vaguely recall some guy called Wade Boggs being the lead-off hitter for some team in a World Series I watched around 20 years ago, but I don’t really grok why he was in that position.

I’m more of a cricket fan. I’ve only watched a few dozen baseball games in my entire life. Please, tell me how the order of the batting lineup works in your game, because it seems pretty arbitrary to me.

2

Enormously overrated by baseball fans. Putting your batters’ name in a hat and batting them in the order you randowly withdraw them is about as effective as a carefully planned order, and managers have done that on occasion (usually when ther team is in a batting slump) though baseball fans who disavow scientific study of the game will kill you for suggesting that batting order is unimportant.

They maintain that you need a fast guy at the top of the order, a good sacrifice bunter hitting second, your best all-around hitter batting third, your best power hitter batting fourth, etc.–probably it’s a good idea to have your high OBP guys first and your best power hitters behind them, but really it doesn’t matter much more than a rat’s ass…

3

Others can correct me, clarify, etc. as they see fit. The conventional wisdom looks about like this…

Leadoff - most importantly, this should be someone who can get on base. Secondarily, you want someone that can take a lot of pitches, either by having a good eye or by fouling them off. This is so that they can get an idea of what and how the pitcher is throwing, and also to help wear out the pitcher by the middle of the game, and get to the (hopefully) weaker bullpen pitchers.

2nd - typically a speedy player, and also one that can put the ball in play to advance the leadoff batter.

3rd - typically the best hitter on the team. If things have gone well, the leadoff guy is in scoring position and the 3rd batter will be able to drive him in. Being the best hitter team, the pitcher will often be more careful around this hitter, which could lead to a walk and multiple runners on the base for…

Clean-up - this is traditionally the best power hitter. You want him fourth on the chance that he comes up to bat with multiple runners on base. A home run will be (hopefully) for multiple runs.

5th - the style of this batter is similar to the clean-up hitter, but he usually doesn’t have quite the power, so he’s dropped a spot.

6th-9th - as far as I can tell, it’s just the remaining few batters who are worse/less powerful than the guy before, which limits their at bats (as you noted already, OP).

In the National League, the pitcher bats, but in the American League, there’s a designated hitter. I don’t know how long he did it, but Tony LaRussa was the Cardinals (NL team) manager and he would sometimes have the pitcher (weakest hitter in the line-up) hit 8th. The idea was that he wasn’t likely to get that many more at bats than in the 9th position, but by having a slightly better hitter in the 9th spot, when the line-up recycled itself, the lead-off through clean-up spots would have one more decent batter in front of them.

Example:
First inning - Hit, out (runner to second), hit (runners on 1st and 3rd), home run, single, out, out, out.

Second inning - Now the 9th batter is up first in the new inning. If it were the pitcher, you could pencil him in for an out, and now the top of the line-up has just two outs remaining. It’s harder to move runners without outs to play with. With a half-decent batter in the 9th spot, it’s not quite the throwaway position that you get with the antiquated NL rules of having pitchers bat. :slight_smile:

4

I would buy this except for the fact that a planned order means your best hitters get more at bats per game. Having your best hitter getting more at bats than your worst hitter must be a net positive effect.

Worrying about fast guys vs. power guys is less interesting, and likely not significant.

I’m on the fence with breaking up the lefty/righty mix, I can see how it would be a good deal to have the other team’s “lefty specialist” limited to 1 batter vs. 2-3 batters.

5

OK, you guys (or gals :)) seem to be making some distinction between fast/best/power hitters.

Explain that to me a little bit more.

I’m thinking that when you’re talking about a fast player you’re talking about a guy who can steal bases. “Best” hitter is a player who can get a piece of the ball consistently? And a “power” player is someone who when he does get a piece of the ball is more likely to knock it over the outfield wall for a home run. Am I getting that right?

6

Yeah, that’s correct. in this context, “best” hitter is also referred to as “hitting for average,” that is, he has a high batting average because he’s always getting hits.

Power hitters are the guys who can hit home runs, doubles, and singles deep enough into the outfield that a runner can move from second to home.

And speed is speed on the basepaths (it also can contribute to average because the speedy batter-runner can sometimes beat a throw to first that would get a guy with more typical speed out).

–Cliffy

7

I’m ignorant about baseball, but I always thought that the next batter in the rotation when the inning ended would be the first up in the next inning. If that is the case, and since not every inning has 3 up, 3 outs in a row, it wouldn’t be long until the first batter of an inning might be any batter in the lineup.

Am I clear? Tell me if this is wrong.

8

Oops. I just noticed in my example of the pitcher hitting 8th vs 9th, I gave the batting team 4 outs in the first inning. Let’s pretend that the 7th hitter got a single with 2 outs, and the 8th hitter (the pitcher) got the final out.

9

That’s correct. But being earlier in the batting order means you are likely to get one at bat more per game.

10

You are absolutely correct. But over the course of the game, the batters nearest the front of the batting order do stand a better chance to get an extra at-bat than those at the end. And over the course of the season that does add up to a few extra at-bats for those hitters.

Whether or not it makes enough of a difference to really ‘make a difference’ is open to debate, and like all other debates in baseball, there will never be a consensus opinion on the subject.

11

Contrary to popular opinion until about 1980, OBP (getting on base) is far more important than any other skill, so you want your high OBP guys getting a lot of at-bats. (It used to be thought that leadoff batters should be fast guys, but fast, low-OBP players like Luis Aparicio would probably bat at the bottom of the order now.) It seems kind of wasteful to have your power hitters hit HRs with no runners on base, which is why it’s thought best to bat them after your OBP guys. Of course, sometimes your best OBP guys are also your best power hitters (Mickey Mantle, for example) so that’s an issue. But studies have shown that order doesn’t make as much of a difference as people instinctively think it would.

12

This chart at Beyond the Boxscore shows that average runs scored are substantially higher in the first inning vs. the second, and higher in the 1st than any other inning. The accompanying article attributes most of this effect to lineup; you’re guaranteed to start with the lineup’s leadoff hitter in the 1st inning, therefore the second inning is particularly liable to starting with a bottom-of-the-lineup guy, but this “syncing” effect of lineup position vs. inning fades away over the course of the game such that other factors (pitchers tiring, closers) have a stronger effect.

This seems to indicate that the traditional method of building a lineup outlined by mkecane has an effect. Since the pitcher (the batter most likely to create an out/end an inning) bats 9th and the 1st inning is guaranteed to start with the leadoff, the leadoff hitter is the most likely batter to start any randomly-chosen inning. It would be nice to see the average of runs scored in innings other than the 1st that start with the leadoff batter in order to confirm this, but I haven’t found that data.

13

CJJ*, I think the statistical question isn’t whether the grouped best hitters score more than the grouped worst hitters, but whether the team as a whole scores more by grouping the best hitters together.

14

I’d like to see the math on that. Let’s take the 9 players on one team, ignoring the designated hitter for now. I don’t know what the average number of batters is per inning, but let’s say all 3 are put out in order, every inning. That means the first batter in the order will come up again in the 4th inning, and again in the 7th. Same for the 2nd & 3rd.

The 4th, 5th and 6th batters will be in innings 2, 5 and 8.

The 7th, 8th and 9th batters will be in innings 3, 6 and 9, then we start over.

But that’s just under ideal (rare?) conditions with 3 batters, 3 outs per inning. As soon as you change that, the sequence changes.

Can you show me the math, under realistic conditions, that says that batters 1, 2 and 3 stand a better chance to get more at-bats than others?

15

If 2 batters (any spot in the line-up) get a hit (or walk, HBP, etc) and don’t get caught stealing, part of a double play, etc, then the lead-off and #2 hitters will get 4 plate appearances vs the 3 PAs of the rest of the line-up. If the team gets 11 hits, walks, etc, then they’ll get 5 PAs vs the 4 PAs for the rest of the line-up. If they get 18 hits, under this scenario, then everyone will get 5 PAs.

16

This is actually trivial, and can probably be explained better by hand-waving than by rigorous math :slight_smile:
In a perfect game, each batter will come up (and be put out) exactly 3 times.
Now if one batter, at any point in the game, gets on base, then the team as a whole will get 28 At Bats. AB #28 will be taken by the #1 batter, who will have 4 ABs for the game.
Lather, rinse repeat up to 8 men getting on base – you will have 4 ABs for each batter but the #9 spot; if 9 men get on base, you have 36 AB, or 4 each. At 37 ABs, your #1 spot has 5 ABs and the rest of the team get 4 apiece… etc., etc.

So, the #1 spot will have as many or 1 more AB than the #2 spot, the #2 spot will have as many or 1 more than the #3 spot, and so on down the lineup.

ETA: stolen [del]base[/del] post for mkecane :slight_smile:

17

In addition to the fact that an early hitter gets more plate appearances, even though the leadoff hitter doesn’t usually lead off other innings (sometimes he does, of course), the grouping stays the same. So whether it’s 1, 2, or 3 leading off, you still have high average guys followed by power guys. (And because it takes three outs to end an inning, that’s also true when 8 and 9 lead off so long as a few guys manage to get on.) So, if managing your batting order makes any difference at all, it probably continues to make some difference in later innings as well.

There is also the related issue of “protection,” which the sabremetics guys say doesn’t exist, but I’ll never believe it no matter what evidence is presented. (I guess this is what religion is like.) Namely, that when Hitter X bats suurounded by good hitters, he does better than when surrounded by poor hitters (f’rex, when someone’s moved from #3 to #7).

This is (theoretically) because the pitcher is more willing to throw his finesse game, working the corners and sides of the strike zone. When executed properly, these pitches are much harder to hit than fastballs down the middle. But it’s risky for a pitcher because if he misses his spot a few times by even a couple inches, the guy gets a walk. If the hitter is surrounded by poorer hitters, the pitcher isn’t that worried about maybe giving up a walk – there’s nobody coming up who’s likely to knock the guy in. If the hitter is surrounded by other good hitters, then a walk is much more dangerous, so the pitcher (again, theoretically) has to pitch more conservatively – and that means pitches down the middle, where they’re easier to hit.

–Cliffy

18

Yeah, like mkecane and Noone Special said. Here’s another stab at an explanation:

A team will bat through the order N times during the game, and then get somewhere between 0 and 8 batters into the order again. So some guys will have had N trips to the plate, and rest will have had N+1. But those guys with N+1 appearances will always be the start of the lineup.

If we assume that the actual position in the batting order that is the final plate appearance of the game is uniformly distributed* (i.e., 11.1% of the time the leadoff hitter is the last guy up, 11.1% of the time it’s the #2 hitter, etc.) then the #1 batter will expect to have one more plate appearance than the #9 batter in 8 out of every 9 games. (They’ll have the same number of plate appearances in the remaining 1 out of 9 games.)

Under those assumptions, over a 162-game season, the leadoff position would expect to come to the plate 144 more times than the #9 position.

That’s the most extreme difference. Similar math can come up with the number relating any two positions in the order.

    • I’d be surprised if it was truly uniform, but I suspect it’s close.
19

Unless your team is having a perfect game* thrown at them every single day, there isn’t any possible way for your 1, 2, 3 batters to NOT get more at-bats.

A perfect game is one in which every single one of your batters is put out while at bat. No hits, no walks, no bases on error. There are 9 batters, and 27 outs - so each batter would get exactly 3 plate appearances*. There have been less than 30 perfect games pitched in the history of the MLB.

**It should be noted that plate appearances and at-bats aren’t the same thing. A hitter earning a walk doesn’t accumulate an at-bat, but does accumulate a plate appearance. It’s silly and nonsensical, you’ll just have to trust us on this one.

20

Umm…unless your total plate appearances is a multiple of 9, of course. Sorry for the absolute statement.