The Order of Things

Tom, a Met fan from Charleston, asks how much the Mets are hurting themselves by batting Jose Reyes first and Luis Castillo and Alex Cora second?

In one sense, the Mets are killing themselves by playing a middle infield that can't hit. Reyes (.222/.266/.284), Castillo (.250/.338/.292) and Cora (.239/.325/.313) are all offensive weak knees so far this year, their other skills not withstanding. Reyes has shown some life the last week, but living to 100 may not be enough to lift his performance to respectability. (Cora mostly spots Castillo at second -- both on the field and in the batting order -- so I treat them as one entry.)

Generally, batting order doesn't much matter.  Our baseball noggins have been wired to conceive of lead-off hitters as skeeters, #2 batters as bat control gurus and the middle of the order comprising the best hitter, the cleanup hitter and the secondary slugger, respectively. Research shows there's nothing sacrosanct about this, or any other, configuration.

There are, however, three concepts that do matter in a lineup:

1. Your best hitters should bat most, so write small numbers next to their names.

2. Alternate handedness to mitigate the value of pitching changes.

3. Lead-off batters matter because they're up with no one on base at least once every game.

It's here that Jerry Manuel has handcuffed his offense. Reyes may be a hummingbird on the basepaths, but he puts the Mets in a one-out hole nearly three-quarters of the time. Castillo/Cora comes to the plate more often than David Wright, Jason Bay and other players who can actually hit major league pitching. Over a season, batting second will add something like 50 plate appearances versus batting eighth. Castillo this year and Cora this lifetime have "batting eighth" written all over them.

Except, then where would Jeff Francoeur bat? For a guy with his athletic ability, Francoeur is cheap beer, and his expiration date has passed. Despite his speed, power and cannon arm, Francoeur's complete lack of plate discipline will soon end his major league career. He has now followed last year's .280/.310/.425 with .211/.273/.362 so far this year. If you are what your record says you are, Frenchy is rated Triple-A.

In short, the Mets have myriad woes. The order of their lineup isn't one of the big ones, but installing poor hitters at the top of the order is bad medicine, even if they're slap-hitting speed burners.

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Yankee Ingenuity

Word from Yankee spring training camp is that Joe Girardi will flip Derek Jeter and Johnny Damon in the lineup, moving his shortstop up to leadoff. Jeter's response was that he doesn't care, telling the Associated Press, "You hit 60 seconds earlier than you normally do."

One of the things that great players often demonstrate is an intuitive feel for the game that had never been borne out by the numbers, or even by conventional wisdom. I'm reminded of Greg Maddux and Roger Clemens, both correctly attributing statistical declines in their mid-career performance to bad luck and weak defense respectively. Each went on to win subsequent Cy Youngs.

Jeter's flippancy about his place in the batting order demonstrates that he understands how irrelevant it is. Batting order is largely immaterial beyond a few rudimentary concepts. As long as your best hitters bat at the top of the order, and you maximize the effects of handedness, there's little to be gained by sweating the exact order. About the only egregious error that managers regularly commit is to bat a weak-hitting speedster in the leadoff spot. Simply put, that strategy gives a weak hitter 50 extra plate appearances a year.

Being similar kinds of hitters, either Jeter or Damon would be a reasonable choice to lead off. Both get on base and around the bases, but are unlikely to waste a lot of home runs to start the game.

So why bother? My guess is that Girardi exploited Damon's .375 OBP last year and expects him to regress closer to his career average of .354 this year, while recognizing that Jeter's .363 OBP in 2008 was the second lowest of his career and is more like to edge closer to his lifetime .383 pace this year. If so, it demonstrates that Girardi also understands something about baseball.