How important is the batting order to a team’s success?
In 1926, the New York Yankees opened the season with first baseman Lou Gehrig batting third and left fielder Babe Ruth hitting fourth. Over the next 10 years this dangerous slugging duo occupied the third and fourth spots in the majority of games played by the Yankees. Sometimes Gehrig was third. Sometimes Ruth was third. But these two, together, formed the first — and likely the greatest — combination of power hitters in baseball history. They won four American League pennants and finished lower than second only once.
Three of the years they did not win the pennant they finished behind the Philadelphia Athletics, whose batting order featured Mickey Cochrane hitting third and Al Simmons fourth.
The Yankees developed another great power combination in the middle 1950s when Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra held down the third and fourth spots in the batting order.
In the early 1960s, Berra slid down the order and Mantle was paired with Roger Maris. The Yankees were baseball’s dominant team during all of those years.
Meanwhile, the National League developed its own destructive duos. The Brooklyn Dodgers featured Duke Snider hitting third and Jackie Robinson fourth. Later Snider was paired with Roy Campanella. They had competition in Milwaukee where the Braves featured Henry Aaron and Eddie Mathews for the better part of a decade. After moving to San Francisco, the Giants unleashed the combination of Willie Mays and Willie McCovey. Later Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine terrorized the National League with Joe Morgan and Johnny Bench and later with Morgan and George Foster.
Get the picture? For nearly a century most of baseball’s greatest teams have had accomplished power hitters occupying the third and fourth spots in the batting order. It was universally believed that a successful offense would have “table setters” — speedsters who could get on base — occupying the top two spots in the batting order. Then the “meat of the order” would follow and drive them in. The third and fourth hitters were the most important parts of any attack.
That formula was universally accepted within the game of baseball from the big leagues to the little leagues.
Then a challenger of sorts, appeared in 1965 when a college professor named Earnshaw Cook published Percentage Baseball, a book that argued against many of the accepted norms on baseball strategy, including the creation of the lineup. Cook, a graduate of Princeton University, was teaching mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins when he cited mathematical data which he said proved that each team’s best hitter should lead off, regardless of his skill set. The second best hitter should bat second, etc.
This was, of course, before the era of the computer. Cook used a slide rule to perform his calculations. The baseball community essentially ignored them.
Perhaps it would be appropriate to call Cook the first sabermetrician. Bill James, no doubt, would disagree. Most people credit James with inventing sabermetrics — a computer-driven study of baseball data. Or, to use a more modern word, analytics.
James began filling bookshelves in 1981, about 16 years after Percentage Baseball was published. He sneered at Cook, dismissing him as a scientist who knew nothing about baseball, and argued that the selection of the batting order was one of the least important tasks a manager performed. To “prove” his point, he selected the 1930 Chicago Cubs — a team that scored 998 runs in 156 games. James let his computer rearrange the batting order in every possible permutation and concluded that the worst possible batting order would have cost the team no more than 50 runs.
That’s analytics for you and there is probably no greater advocate of analytics today than Phillies manager Gabe Kapler. He apparently makes very few moves without first consulting his computer.
So, what’s with this latest lineup the Phillies are using? The one that has Bryce Harper leading off and Rhys Hopkins batting second? Aren’t those two guys the prototype three and four hitters in a pre-analytics baseball lineup? And what about the use of Jean Segura, a classic table-setter, in the cleanup spot?
Mr. Analytics, himself, appears to have adopted Earnshaw Cook’s theory that the lineup should start with the best hitter and work its way down to the least.
Or, perhaps he has adopted James’ notion that the batting order really isn’t important.
Either way it seems pretty weird to a traditionalist.
The Brewers are a game and a half out of a playoff berth despite a -22 run differential… Indians catcher Roberto Perez has caught 744 innings and has yet to be charged with a single passed ball…The Marlins’ Ryne Stanek is now in the National League but he still leads the American League in games started. He opened 27 games with the Rays, but never pitched more than two innings any time he started…The two longest hitting streaks of the year (19 games) belong to Christian Yelich of the Brewers and Kevin Newman of the Pirates, Earlier Yelich had a separate streak of 18 games…The Tigers are 16-42 in home games…The Dodgers lead the majors with 46 sacrifice bunts. All but two of them were the work of pitchers…The Yankees are 56-27 against right-handed starters…The Marlins’ home attendance is 625,741. Every other NL team has more than doubled that amount…The Rays are 13-4 in interleague play. The rest of the AL combined is 93-121…Nelson Cruz of the Twins has the majors’ best home run ration. He has connected one time in every 10.1 at bats.
Hall of Fame voter Jay Dunn has written baseball for The Trentonian for 51 years. Contact him at jaydunn8@aol.com