Saturday, March 26, 2016

Team Offense, Tampa Bay Rays

The 2016 series on team offense continues with the Tampa Bay Rays. The Rays finished twenty fifth in the majors and fourteenth in the American League in 2015 with 3.98 runs scored per game.

Once again I am using a combination of RotoChamp and USA Today as a source of default lineups. Neither seems to match reality that well at the moment, so I went with a mixture and a perusal of recent box scores. That Kevin Cash 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: 4.64
Probable lineup: 4.60
Worst lineup: 4.45
Regressed lineup: 4.27

The Rays are another team in which talent is consistent throughout the lineups, so a number of players can be moved around without degrading the offense. The LAT likes Evan Longoria batting second, Corey Dickerson batting fourth, and Kevin Kiermaier batting sixth. It then mixes batters up between the other spots, with the weaker hitters seven and eight.

Some of the big projected jump in runs scored in due to Corey Dickerson’s projection. Marcels do not take into account park factors. Dickerson was a great hitter at Coors, rather weak on the road in his first three years in the majors. The more computationally complex projections at FanGraphs put his slugging percentage in the mid .400s. I would take the above numbers as a ceiling.

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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