Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Team Offense, Cleveland Indians

The 2016 series on team offense continues with the Cleveland Indians. The Indians finished eighteenth in the majors and eleventh in the American League in 2015 with 4.16 runs scored per game.

Once again I am using a combination of RotoChamp and USA Today as a source of default lineups. I’m going with the RotoChamp lineup. The two sources agree on four through six, but have very different top thirds. Jason Kipnis seems to be leading off the most in recent games, but I’ve seen Francisco Lindor and Carlos Santana there as well. I’m going with Kipnis, Lindor, and Santana. That Terry Francona lineup is plugged into the Lineup Analysis Tool (LAT) using Musings Marcels as the batter projections. That information produces the following results (Runs per game):

Best lineup: 4.75
Probable lineup: 4.70
Worst lineup: 4.50
Regressed lineup: 4.34

No matter which way you slice the lineup, offense is projected to be better for the Indians than in 2015. Of course, last year the LAT projected the Indians to have a very good offense, and it fell flat.

The LAT likes Lindor in the two hole, with either Kipnis or Santana leading off, the other batting ninth. It likes the three of them at the top of the order, but coming around 9-1-2 instead of 1-2-3. The rest of the LAT order is quite different than the default Cleveland order, but there isn’t a lot of difference in talent there. Francona’s lineup is perfectly fine. As long as they place Kipnis, Lindor, and Santana together, whoever is coming up behind them will have plenty of RBI opportunities.

You can follow the data for the series in this Google spreadsheet.

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Previous posts in this series:



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