The 2018 series on team offense continues with the St. Louis Cardinals. The Cardinals finished thirteenth in the major leagues and seventh in the National League in 2017 with 4.70 runs scored per game.
I am using RotoChamp as a source of default lineups. That Mike Matheny 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 produced by the Cardinals pitchers in 2017. That information produces the following results (Runs per game):
Best lineup: 5.07
Probable lineup: 4.85
Worst lineup: 4.49
Regressed lineup: 4.50
The Marcel projection for Yadier Molina stands at .323/.403 OBP/Slug. That is hardly the type of production that a team desires from someone batting fifth in the order. The projection at Baseball Reference is for .323/.409. Steamer, at FanGraphs is the most optimistic at .325/.415. Maybe the Cardinals know something we don’t, but if they bat Molina fifth because he’s the veteran leader and wants to bat fifth, then St. Louis is leaving a lot of runs on the table.
Notice that the top 30 lineups are all over the place. There are lineups with Dexter Fowler, Tommy Pham, and Matt Carpenter batting 1-2-3. There are lineups with Marcell Ozuna batting fourth, but also seventh. In none of them, however, does Molina bat fifth. He does show up multiple times in the fifth slot in the worst possible orders, however. I suspect Molina’s bat will be poor enough this year to push him down in the order sooner than later.
The nice thing for Matheny is that any reasonable lineup works well. He has four or five batters he can use at the top of the order, another three or four who could reasonably batting in the middle. It would be a good group for the pitcher batting eighth, as all the players have good OBPs. Getting one of those in front of some of the better players at the top should add a few runs.
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:
- Introduction
- Houston Astros
- New York Yankees
- Colorado Rockies
- Chicago Cubs
- Washington Nationals
- Cleveland Indians
- Minnesota Twins
- Arizona Diamondbacks
- Texas Rangers
- Boston Red Sox
- Miami Marlins
- Los Angeles Dodgers
from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2Im6LaW
No comments:
Post a Comment