See here for 2016 batting orders
A friend was ranting to me about how the BJ’s are mismanaged. He didn’t like the batting order. I don’t know much about it, but I’m guessing that Bautista and Donaldson should be 3rd and 4th because they are power hitters.
The conventional idea is that one and two have a good on base percentage and three and four are power hitters that hit sac flies and home runs and stay out of double plays.
It’s been fine. Bautista and Donaldson have two of the highest OBP on the team, and Bautista in particular has shown a lot less power this year than previously. His walk rate is one of his valuable features so far this season.
The Jays don’t really have an archetypal leadoff guy (if anybody mentions Ben Revere, I will hurt you :mad:). Personally, I applaud Gibbons for being willing to buck conventional wisdom and instead tries to get his best hitters the most at-bats.
ETA: If I were to complain about the batting order at all, it’d be that Carrera and Pillar between them had 52 games batting leadoff. God, it was painful when the lineup turned over to either of those two.
Your friend is wrong.
That’s fine, but the Blue Jays have the personnel they do and have to make a batting order out of who they have. It would be nice if they had Tim Raines in his prime but they don’t.
Here are all Blue Jays regular players, including Travis, Barney and Upton, ranked by on base percentage:
The truth is that this is probably the best lineup you could have, removing Upton and Barney and reserving them for late inning defensive work - you put them in in place of Bautista and Travis when the team has a late lead - and spelling guys off. When Navarro spells off Martin at catcher he should hit eighth or ninth; Thole should not be on the team at all. (Pillar’s glove makes his bat worth carrying, so he should play almost every day.) There’s no issue of speed because the team doesn’t have much speed anyway, really just Upton and Pillar are fast and they can’t get on base. If you need a pinch runner, now you can insert Pompey.
Now, Gibbons does not exactly do this, and in fact doesn’t run the same lineup out every night but, generally speaking, the guys with high OBPs are at the top of the order and the guys with low OBPs are at the bottom. He has tried leading Travis off, as he did yesterday, but not a lot. So I’m not sure what more he could do. There is really no obvious leadoff hitter, except Donaldson, and Donaldson usually bats second so he’s hitting in the first inning anyway.
What does your friend want done differently? Bat Donaldson fourth? That’s stupid; Donaldson would get fewer at bats, not more, and he is the best hitter on the team. The worst lineup error the team has made all year was in batting Pillar leadoff at the beginning of the season, but they gave that up. That was, I would agree, a stupid error, once I said at the time was stupid and Rysto did too. (Carrera also hit leadoff but in fairness he was hitting well, and when he stopped hitting he was promptly dumped from that role.) But Gibbons no longer does that, and his willingness to bat Bautista and Donaldson 1-2 is something many teams do NOT have the guts to do even though it makes a lot of sense, so he’s made up for it.
The difference made by small lineup changes - batting Bautista first instead of third, or Donaldson second instead of third, and stuff like that - is really, really small. It really doesn’t make much difference at all, and in terms of small differences like that a manager is probably better off letting players hit where they feel most comfortable. The only way you can really screw up a batting order is by doing things in a way that is deliberately insane, like if they batted Upton leadoff and Donaldson ninth. Since obviously the Jays are not doing that, there is not much to complain about.
To perhaps introduce more statistics than you wanted to read about, let me propose a hypothesis; if a manager was REALLY mismanaging the batting order, what would we expect the result to be? Well, it seems obvious to me; the team’s performance in scoring runs would be strangely poor as compared to its skills in hitting; a team that had a good batting average and hit many homers would be scoring fewer runs than you would expect. Is that true of Toronto?
It clearly is not true. The Blue Jays are the second-highest-scoring offense in the American League, behind Boston. (Texas has scored the same number of runs as of right now but they have played one more game.) Toronto is clearly not nearly as good a hitting team as Boston, who clearly surpass Toronto in slugging percentage, on base percentage, and in fact Toronto appears to me to be not as good a hitting team as either Cleveland or Detroit, in spite of which they’ve scored more runs. The Blue Jays are not a good baserunning team, as evidenced by both their stats and a plain viewing of the way they run the bases - but despite that weakness and not having the best overall hitting stats in the league, they’re second in runs scored. FanGraphs calculate the Jays as a team that should have scored 669 runs so far, and in fact they have scored 669 runs. It seems to me Gibbons is getting max production from the tools he has.
How did Gibbons do last year? The 2015 Blue Jays were one of the best offensive teams in the history of Major League Baseball. And the team, again, outperformed what you would expect; the component hitting stats say they should have scored about 854 runs, but they instead scored 891. Well, what about 2014? The Blue Jays scored 723 runs; according to the runs created formula, they should have scored… 734.
So really, overall, I don’t see a lot of evidence Gibbons is deploying his hitters in the wrong fashion.
[QUOTE=Rysto]
if anybody mentions Ben Revere, I will hurt you
[/QUOTE]
I for one am rather glad Revere is gone, inasmuch as
That’s what I meant. I keep hearing Revere brought up as a prototypical leadoff guy cause he hit .300 last year, so people whine that the Jays should have kept him to hit leadoff. The fact is he never walks so he’s not suited to be a leadoff guy, and that combined with his lack of power means he’s really not a good hitter. But he hit for average and stole bases, so a certain segment of the fan base loved him.