Daily Archives: February 12, 2010

The order of business

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In the comments section this week, someone brought up a potential batting order for the Mets this year and it got me thinking.

Specifically, it got me thinking: “Hey, I should run the Mets hitters through David Pinto’s Batting Order Optimizer and see what comes.”

Pinto’s tool, based on the work of Cyril Morong, Ken Arneson and Ryan Armbrust, uses players’ on-base and slugging percentages to generate the optimal lineup for each team, by runs per game. It’s fun to play with, though since it actually involves plugging player names and stats into a spreadsheet, it’s one of the nerdiest baseball-related pursuits you’ll ever enjoy.

Anyway, I probably should have considered platoon splits and all, but it’s Friday. I simply plugged in the Mets’ position players’ CHONE projections for 2010 and a .150/.150 line for “Pitcher McGee” and this is what it spit out, a lineup that would, it claims, score 4.78 runs per game:

1. David Wright .391 / .502
2. Jason Bay .376 / .514
3. Angel Pagan .334 / .428
4. Daniel Murphy .328 / .429
5. Jose Reyes .360 / .458
6. Jeff Francoeur .317 / .435
7. Omir Santos .296 / .359
8. Pitcher McGee .150 / .150
9. Luis Castillo .367 / .350

Before you freak out, I’m not saying that’s what should happen. Obviously it won’t, for one thing — there’s no way the Mets will hit Wright leadoff and Bay second — and it’s all based on the CHONE projections, which are only projections. It doesn’t account for handedness or egos or anything else. This is merely what would be optimal for that group of guys based on Morong’s assessment of how to best weight OBP vs. SLG with respect to batting-order positions. Wright bats first because he projects to have the highest OBP, simple as that.

I imagine the Mets’ actual lineup to start the season will look something more along the lines of:

1. Reyes
2. Castillo
3. Wright
4. Bay
5. Murphy
6. Francoeur
7. Pagan
8. Santos
9. McGee

I have no evidence that will be the order, plus there’s always a chance someone gets hurt. This was just my best guess at how it will shake out. Francoeur and Murphy are flip-floppable, but I figured hypothetical Jerry Manuel would want to use Murph to break up the righties in the order.

That lineup, according to the Baseball Musings tool, would average 4.536 runs per game if the players held to their CHONE projections, which they probably won’t.

Here’s something, though: All of the top suggested lineups for the 2010 Mets, according to the optimizer, include the pitcher batting eighth and Luis Castillo batting ninth.

I remember when Tony La Russa first started batting his pitchers eighth a couple of years ago. I ripped him apart for it. Not in print, thankfully, but man, I called him all sorts of nasty things to anyone who would listen. What kind of moron would voluntarily give his pitcher an at-bat earlier in the game than a position player, and more at-bats total?

But Tom Boorstein, in the midst of one of my rants, told me there was a lot of evidence that showed that, indeed, there was an advantage to batting the pitcher eighth and a high-OBP, low-SLG guy ninth. I don’t remember exactly what article he pointed me to online — it might have been this one — but I’ve since come to realize that the idea actually makes a lot of sense.

After all, a team tends to concentrate its very best hitters near the top of the order — as it should — to maximize their at-bats and increase its chances of scoring runs early in the game.

But after one time through the lineup, it’s no safe bet the batting order will reset with the leadoff hitter starting off the inning. Putting a hitter like Castillo in the ninth slot decreases the odds that the top of the Mets’ order — the best hitters — comes up with outs on the board and ups the chances they’ve got someone on base to drive in.

Since Jose Reyes has pretty decent power for a leadoff man, having Castillo hitting ahead of him the second turn through the order would give Reyes more opportunities to drive runs in, rather than forcing him to hit after Omir Santos and the pitcher, near-automatic outs.

Plus, part of my original argument — that moving the pitcher up in the order ultimately gives more at-bats to pitchers — is just silly. Starting pitchers rarely bat four times in a game, and when they do, they’re probably pitching well enough that it doesn’t really matter that they’re hitting so frequently.

More likely, a starting pitcher is being replaced in the lineup by a far superior hitter after his second or third at-bat, and every time his spot in the order comes up after that.

Going back to the Baseball Musings tool, I plugged in this lineup:

1. Reyes
2. Pagan
3. Wright
4. Bay
5. Murphy
6. Francoeur
7. Santos
8. McGee
9. Castillo

The outcome? 4.737 runs a game, .21 higher than the one I’m guessing the Mets will actually go with, and about 34 runs more over the course of a 162-game season.

That’s all just in theory, of course, and I’m just having fun with some nerdery on a Friday afternoon. So calm yourselves down.

How to make ski jumping more awesome

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I’ve voiced my distaste for the Olympic Games on numerous occasions, but due to my old job editing the now-defunct WCSN.com, I know more than I’d care to about the Games and have plenty of opinions about them that I’ll probably end up sharing here.

Before I continue, a little background: WCSN.com’s big calling card was its abundance of live streaming video. The site broadcast sporting events from around the globe, which required a whole lot of mechanics to pull off, and so always necessitated someone to just sit there monitoring the video stream to make sure nothing went wrong.

Many times, that guy was me. I got paid to watch silly sporting events from all sorts of strange places at all sorts of bizarre hours. Sometimes I’d have to write recaps, at least a few of which are still archived at UniversalSports.com. Often, they ooze with sarcasm.

One of my favorite sports to monitor in those days was ski jumping, but I won’t lie: The event’s appeal — especially during the overnight shift — is identical to what I understand is a big draw of NASCAR. You watch to see if they crash.

Sorry if that sounds inhuman. It probably is. But no one ever got irreparably injured in the events I was watching and, you know, they signed up to be ski jumpers, so it clearly comes with the territory.

What I didn’t realize in all the time I spent watching ski jumping was that apparently the entire sport has something of an eating-disorder problem. Who knew? The Times has a great, lengthy feature today detailing the dilemma, including proposed solutions to the issue.

I’m fully in support of much fatter ski jumpers, because, like I said, the most entertaining part of ski jumping is when they fall. (Again, I’m sorry I’m such a jerk.) And as I stated yesterday, fat people falling is hilarious.

But the most important rule change that needs to be made to ski jumping — and if I haven’t offended the ski-jumping community already, this probably will — is this: Ski jumpers should not be judged on style. As it is, five judges rate each ski jumper on a scale of 1-20, and the outcome weighs heavily in the event’s final standing.

I cannot express how dumb it is that ski jumpers are judged on style. It’s inexplicably dumb. The object of ski jumping should be to ski jump as far as you damn can. Who cares how cleanly you land, or how you hold your skis while you’re in the air, or your balance?

It should be about distance, baby. Length. I don’t care if you look like a total clown getting there and crash at the finish, I want to see how far a human being can propel himself on skis. That’s ski jumping. It’s not called “ski aerial balancing.”

Put up a big, cushy pad at the finish, enforce a 200-pound weight minimum, then sit back and watch these fat bastards fly. I guarantee it’d be the most-watched sport in the history of the Winter Olympics.

Items of note

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Honestly, Bob Raissman. Not to sound like an SNY homer, but does anyone expect Keith Hernandez to be less than ridiculously candid, ever?

Pat Andriola of the Hardball Times stops by Amazin’ Avenue to drop some Perpetual Pedro love. Feliciano’s long been one of my favorite Mets, and he’s pretty hilarious to cover. One time, after he got out the Phillies’ big lefties in order on six pitches or something, I asked him about it, and he was so remarkably matter-of-fact. I was trying to wean a decent quote out of him, and he was just all, “yeah, I get lefties out, that’s my job.”

I think it’s time we stopped calling futuristic things “space age.” We’ve been going to space for like 50 years, and now we can’t even get to the Moon, apparently. I don’t know what the next frontier is, but we clearly botched the whole space thing. Maybe it should be “deep-sea age.” I bet there’s some awesome stuff going on in the deep-sea that we have no idea about yet.

Frank Thomas retired. I saw him walking around the Hall of Fame in 1992 when I was there for Tom Seaver’s induction ceremony and the White Sox were playing the Mets in the Hall of Fame game. I didn’t consider then that he’d be enshrined himself one day.