debating on tonight's game, but ****.... feel like i've seen Blanco pitch 3 times already. Get started at the Stros game & hit up the bar for the Rockets? Monday Funday.
Assessment so far of this team. Hit and we win. Don't and we lose. We didn't score 10 runs yesterday so we have that going for us.
Last year doesn't mean much this year The problem I have with changing up the lineup is that nobody is good right now. This team has a few top of the lineup hitters and several bottom of the lineup hitters with zero middle of the lineup hitters. The guy who projects as a middle of the lineup hitter is Cam, who the dipshit manager insists on hitting at the bottom while sticking the dregs in the middle.
The entire 2024 season does reveal more than just April of this year, especially for a hitter. You have zero patience with certain guys.
Run-expectancy models – most famously the work in The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball by Tango, Lichtman & Dolphin – show that the #3 hitter: Comes to the plate less often with men on base than the #4 or #5 hitters, and Starts more plate appearances with two outs and nobody on. Because outs in that base-out state are relatively “cheap,” the incremental value of a great bat is muted. The Book therefore recommends putting only your fifth-best overall hitter in the three-hole, after filling #1, #2 and #4 with your top three bats. Beyond the Box ScoreThe Hardball Times Simulation and optimization studies reach the same basic conclusion. Large-scale Monte-Carlo lineup sims and linear-programming work typically find that shifting an elite bat from #3 to #2 (or, less often, #4) is worth about 5–15 runs – roughly 0.5–1.5 wins – over 162 games. That’s not season-saving, but it is real. FanGraphs Community League-wide data show managers are slowly absorbing the lesson. Twenty years ago the modal superstar hit third; today Mike Trout, Mookie Betts, Juan Soto, Yordan Alvarez and Aaron Judge all log most of their PA in the #2 slot, and clubs publicly cite the extra plate appearances and leverage as the reason. Chronicle Managers still over-allocate OBP to the three-spot. A FanGraphs audit of every MLB lineup since the Statcast era began found that the average #3 hitter owns the highest team OBP 1.2 – exactly the opposite of the Tango prescription. In other words, tradition still overrides optimisation more often than not. FanGraphs response credit: chatGPT o3
Excellent post, but..... ....damn those are some bad stats. Small sample theatre, but just hard to optimize lineup when everyone just is playing poorly.
