Something on Batting Order . . . and I’m Back!

This spring, Willie has been messing around with batting Wright second in the order, rather than his usual fifth spot from last year, moving Paul Lo Duca from the 2-spot and dropping him down to sixth or seventh. Is this a good idea? Sure, batting a guy higher up in the order means he’ll get more at-bats over the course of the season, but a lot of managers* subscribe to the idea that each spot in the batting order has a particular job; and some players are much more suited for one job rather than another. I think most players believe this, as well.

What I believe is that batting order doesn’t hardly make any difference at all in how many runs a team scores. If you buy into this kind of thing, which I am sure most major-league managers don’t, David Pinto has got a lineup analysis tool over at Baseball Musings that calculates how many runs you should expect a batting order to score per game. It seems self evident that you’d probably score a different number of runs in a game, even with the same nine guys, if you bat them in a different order.

Anyway, here are two potential lineups for your amusement; one like the standard from last season, with DW batting fifth, and the other with Wright bumped up to second. Included are each hitter’s Marcel** projections for On-base Percentage and Slugging for 2007, which you can plug into Pinto’s lineup analyzer to figure out how many runs each lineup should score. Pitchers are a composite of all Mets pitchers from last season (boy, pitchers are really terrible hitters, aren’t they?) I also included the handedness of the batter, because you know that Willie just loves to do that alternating lefty-righty thing.

What can we conclude from this? It looks like batting Wright second would probably result in about 13 more runs for the Mets than they would get if they batted him fifth. Not a huge difference over the course of a season – it’s less than one run every 10 games. Most of this difference is probably due to the extra plate appearances Wright would get out of the second spot; the number 2-hitter for the Mets came to the plate about 50 more times last season than the number 5-hitter.

On the other hand, most of your smarty-pants sabermetric-types figure that improving a team by 10 runs is worth about one win in the standings (whether by scoring 10 more runs, allowing 10 fewer runs, or by scoring 5 more runs and allowing 5 fewer runs). In what’s probably going to be a much tighter pennant race, with an improved Philly and Atlanta, one extra win in the standings could make the difference between the playoffs and October golf.

I’m going to bet that Willie goes ahead and bats Wright second to start the season. Not because he thinks that giving 50 more plate appearances to Wright (projected .920 OPS) than Paul Lo Duca (projected .744 OPS) would result in more runs, but because he loves that alternating lefty-righty shit. Which just goes to prove that managers can sometimes do the smart thing for stupid reasons.


*Except Billy Martin, who famously drew his batting order out of a hat during a period in the early seventies.

**Marcel is a projection system named after the monkey from Friends, because it’s so simple even a monkey could do it. Despite its simplicity, Marcel is surprisingly accurate.