Thursday, March 16, 2017

Team Offense, Cincinnati Reds

The 2017 series on team offense continues with the Cincinnati Reds. The Reds finished eighth in the National League and eighteenth in the majors in 2016 with 4.42 runs scored per game.

I am using RotoChamp as a source of default lineups. That Bryan Price order is plugged into the Lineup Analysis Tool (LAT) using Musings Marcels as the batter projections. For the pitchers, slot, I used the actual values for the Reds in 2016. That information produces the following results (Runs per game):

Best lineup: 4.44
Probable lineup: 4.08
Worst lineup: 3.68
Regressed lineup: 3.97

As I was typing in the lineup to the LAT, I immediately thought the order was upside down. Three of the worst players in terms of projected OBP are among the first four, while the four best OBPs outside of Joey Votto bat from the fifth slot down. I thought this might be the farthest lineup from optimum so far.

That wasn’t the case, as the LAT agrees with Adam Duvall high power belonging in the fourth slot, and Devin Mesoraco batting seventh. Also, the OBP of those lower order players needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Three of those are younger players, and two of those don’t have much of a track record. Marcel moves them toward the mean, since they have a small sample size, then gives them a boost for their youth. Still, a league average OBP is going to beat Billy Hamilton, Zack Cozart, and Adam Duvall.

Of course, if players like Jose Peraza and Scott Schebler pan out, Price can simply move them to the top of the order where they can supply more RBI opportunities to Votto.

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/2nKIUX3
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)