Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Team Offense, Baltimore Orioles

The 2017 series on team offense continues with the Baltimore Orioles. The Orioles finished seventh in the American League and twelfth in the majors in 2016 with 4.59 runs scored per game.

I am using RotoChamp as a source of default lineups. That Buck Showalter order 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: 4.91
Probable lineup: 4.82
Worst lineup: 4.58
Regressed lineup: 4.45

The LAT agrees with Showalter on the two, four, and eight slots, and that’s enough to get the Orioles 73% of the way to the optimum lineup. I was a bit surprised the lineups were that close with Adam Jones in the lead-off slot. While Jones is not the worst pick for the position, his low OBP compared to many other batters in the order makes me wonder why Showalter puts Jones at the top. Jones is not there for steals, since he doesn’t run much any more. I suspect that because Jones is a veteran of the team, and a well respected player, he is going to bat where he wants to bat. He will be somewhere near the top, and Manny Machado, Chris Davis, and Mark Trumbo make more sense batting behind him.

That’s okay. Sometimes it’s more important to make a player happy. One win in runs could easily be swamped by good or bad luck. There’s still plenty of OBP at the top of the order, and the real lead-off man will be Hyun Soo Kim batting ninth, who will do more to set up the big bats behind Jones for RBI.

If they stay healthy, this should be an improved Baltimore offense.

If you look at Jones’s career, he has not thrived in the first slot.

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

Help support this series and the LAT by donating to the Baseball Musings Pledge Drive.

Previous posts in this series:



from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2npk13R
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)