The 2016 series on team offense continues with the Pittsburgh Pirates. I’m actually going a bit out of order here, but I saw an interesting article and wanted to tie it to this discussion of the Pirates lineup. The Pirates finished eleventh in the majors and fourth in the National League in 2015 with 4.30 runs scored per game (the Twins and Giants finished with the same rate, but each scored one fewer run than the Pirates).
Once again I am using a combination of RotoChamp and USA Today as a source of default lineups. There is quite a difference between the two. I’m going with USA Today, since John Jaso seems to be playing first. That Clint Hurdle lineup is plugged into the Lineup Analysis Tool (LAT) using Musings Marcels as the batter projections. For the pitchers, I used the actual Pirates results for their pitchers from 2015. That information produces the following results (Runs per game):
Best lineup: 4.47
Probable lineup: 4.19
Worst lineup: 3.82
Regressed lineup: 3.98
Note that the USA Today lineup is very far off from the Pirates potential best lineup devised by the LAT. The article linked above, however, discusses the Pirates batting Andrew McCutchen second, and here is why:
Hurdle said he will continue to look at McCutchen at No. 2 but stopped short of saying the move would be permanent.
“Those guys that have done their homework and dug into lineup metrics, and how you stack them, (found) you try to put your best hitters and one, four and two,” Hurdle said. “You start with on-base percentage. … We are looking at some different lineup configurations. On the upside, it gets him to the plate to 20, 30 more times (per season). He hasn’t driven in 100 runs in the third spot. Does this alignment help? … That two spot came up a lot for him this offseason. It makes sense on a lot of different levels.
“The challenge for me is for 47 years the baddest dude in the league hits third. … I have to kind of re-arrange my thinking on it and what’s best for our team. How do we maximize our run production?”
I like that Hurdle is open to new ideas and will give them a thorough vetting. If you follow this series on lineups, you’ll notice that the LAT agrees with the Pirates number crunchers that the third slot is not that relevant. The LAT likes McCutchen leading off, since his OBP is so much better than anyone else on the team. The 20th best lineup does have John Jaso batting lead-off, with McCutchen second, Josh Harrison fourth, and Starling Marte fifth. Today’s Pirates lineup had Jaso and McCutchen 1-2, with Marte then Harrison 4-5. It looks like the Pirates are going to give this alignment a shot.
One thing is important, however. This alignment is based on the pitcher batting eighth. Hurdle thought about it, but last year was not comfortable with the option. If he’s willing to bat McCutchen second, he should get a better batter into the ninth hole.
You can follow the data for the series in this Google spreadsheet.
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Previous posts in this series:
- Introduction
- Toronto Blue Jays
- New York Yankees
- Texas Rangers
- Boston Red Sox
- Colorado Rockies
- Houston Astros
- Kansas City Royals
- Arizona Diamondbacks
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