MLB 2022: The Long and Winding Thread

When you play "MLB The Show" and let the game idle for a bit it cuts to shots of players goofing around while the PA announcer makes stadium announcements in the background. One of the announcements goes, "If you are caught waving your cellphone you will be ejected from the ballpark and immediately sentenced to 20 years in prison."

 

Michael-

A-Rod is also wrong. Bonds was a leadoff man when he came up. He was still hitting leadoff when he developed into a star in 1988.

 

I knew there were a couple of really deep dives statistically into lineup construction, and this one from Retrosheet actually suggests putting your traditional cleanup hitter in the No. 1 spot against right handers is a slightly advantageous strategy in the American League. (Caveat: The computer has no idea the relative speed of each player or whether the defense may choose to pitch around certain batters.)

Evaluating Traditional Lineups (retrosheet.org)

tl;dr

"If anything, my approach shows that batting orders matter even less than people have believed. You would think that with such complicated forces at work here, some truly bizarre lineups might have been more efficient than the obvious ones used throughout the years, but if they exist, the methods described in this article didn't find them. That doesn't mean that specific teams haven't used illogical lineups in the past, only that one of those teams wasn't the San Francisco Giants over the past six years, and that it probably didn't cost these hypothetical teams a lot of runs anyway.

I did notice that there are a lot of lineups as productive as the traditional ones that would look very odd to players, fans and the sporting press. A lot of the lineups near the top of many of these lists feature pitchers (in the NL) hitting other than last, as well as other weird orderings. There are lots of instances of very different lineups producing almost identical results. But if the normal lineups do almost as well as these creative ones, is there any percentage in straying from conventional wisdom? I don't think so. And I guess that's the real conclusion of this article: since all but the most pathologically weird lineups produce just about the same number of runs, I might be inclined to select the lineup that makes the most intuitive sense to the players and fans. Simply put, it's not worth all the fuss you'd cause trying to be clever with lineups."

Tango Tiger has shown that unless you make really ridiculous lineup constructions, the difference over a 162-game season adds up to about 5 runs, or 0.5 wins.

 

Three-run jack by Brandon Marsh and the Braves are backs against the wall in Philly.

EDIT: And Arcia gets one back with a rocket to left. 3-1.

 

Morton taken out after visit from the trainer. If Braves can rally, they are really going to miss the travel day between Games 4 and 5.

 

Of course, if the Phils hit inside the park homers, Game 5 may not happen ...

 

A catcher no less

 

It also helps when the Braves' right fielder becomes a bystander while his center fielder is chasing that ball.

 

It's not as if the guy is slow. Realmuto stole 21 bases this season. Only 15 players stole more in 2022.

 

Hader has been prone to slumps during which he looks terrible in the past. They just didn't last very long. For whatever reason, this one lasted two months and it was a little uglier than usual, but he was dominant in September.

 

And his third career inside-the-parker. Impressive. And now the Phillies have decided to bullpen the rest of the game. Ugh.

EDIT: And Matt Olson makes that decision look stupid two batters in. 4-2, Phils. Managers intentionally try to screw up baseball for the sake of trying to out-LaRussa each other.

 

Wondering who was the last catcher with an inside the parker in the postseason?