MLB Advanced Strategy
Batting Order
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One of the many things I love about DFS and MLB specifically, is that the numbers tell stories.
I’ve enjoyed digging into these numbers over the years and there have been many patterns that I’ve identified. Some are more basic, intuitive even, and some are more advanced.
What I’ll be presenting is the differences in batting order that are league-wide and broken down more on a player by player level.
If you’re not familiar with baseball in general, there are 9 spots in a batting order strategy, I’ll discuss some of the minor differences in the spots that may help you understand the player types a little better.
You can find the data I’ll be referncing on this sheet
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z4vVp9PzItu0pN30dN4_W7Hym16Jo4DLsHfIAIIQMfQ/edit?usp=sharing
I have gathered this info from baseball-reference.com and Fangraphs.com
2016-2017 Data
This will be common knowledge for people who already known baseball but if you’re not familiar, the 1st 5 spots of the lineup are considered the most important.
Here we see that based on this 2017 data, the earlier in the batting order, the more Plate Appearances per games player gets. There is almost no difference between the 1st 3 spots. The 1st batter is called the leadoff and is expected to see around 4 plate appearances per game. The “meat” of the lineup is considered the 2-4 or the 2-5 batters and they see 3-4 per game. After the 5th batter, the plate appearances start to get closer to the average of 3 PAs per game, until we get to 9 which is around 1. The reason 9th is 1 is because this is the spot where many pitchers will be batting and between them and their sub, each play gets a PA or two.
If we’re looking purely for Plate Appearances, we want guys as close to leadoff as possible. Unfortunately DFS is more complex than that so let’s dig a little bit deeper. This is nothing ground-breaking but paying attention to the nuances of the game is what has helped me in my MLB DFS career. Knowing the game of baseball didn’t happen for me until playing DFS for a while, so a batting lineup strategy like the ones in this article are the foundation of my baseball knowledge, though the numbers and patterns.
How does a manager decide the other baseball batting positions in the lineup? Well, usually it’s the high contact, speedier players. There were almost double the amount of Stolen Bases last year from 1st to 2nd spot in the batting order. If we’re going to be looking for stolen bases, it looks like the most upside will be with the leadoff and 2nd spots in the order. Obviously there are players who can steal bases who aren’t batting leadoff, and if we were looking for just SBs, we’d look at the top 2 spots. Keep digging.
How does a manager decide the other positions in the lineup? Well if we’re looking for Homerun upside, we’re looking in the “meat” of the order. The leadoff is a supposed to be a tablesetter, someone who can get on base and maybe even steal. The 2nd spot is for your solid hitters who can hit for contact and some pop. The 3rd spot is for your best hitter, meant to drive in the 1st two for RBIs. The 4th, also known as the “cleanup” batter who is the power hitter you expect to hit you homeruns. Though these numbers show us that almost an equal amount of Homeruns came from the 3-5 spots.
Something I noticed here that is very interesting to me and stood out among these numbers.
The AL had almost 100 more Homeruns from their leadoffs than the NL, primarily due to players with pop leading off moreso on certain teams. 4 of the top 5 Homerun leaders from the leadoff spot in the last 2 years even though Charlie Blackmon led the position in Homeruns. (He gets the Colorado boost)
Batting Order Correlation for Hits last 2 years (2016-17)
I ran the numbers through R using Linear Regression and saw that there is a very high Adjusted R-squared correlation of 0.8877 for the following 3 categories.
Overall Hits, Doubles and Triples. What this shows is in terms of hits alone, your best bet is looking to take players as high in the order as possible.
2016-17 Top 5 Most Plate Appearances by Batting Order
This is in no way a ranking of talent or production, just the quantity of PAs.
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2016-17 Top 5 wRC+ by Batting Order (Minimum 100 Plate Appearances)
This is the list of players who have been the best offensively at their corresponding batting orders. (Excluding David Ortiz who retired)
These are the primary spots these players have batted in during the past 2 years, sometimes that changes but when they are in this spot in the lineup, they are at their best.
Jose Altuve, Mike Trout, Aaron Judge, Jose Martinez all appear in the top 5s twice.
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Now that we have seen some of the differences between the order of the lineup, I want to point out what we can do to identify spots where a batter may perform better or worse in a certain spot in the batting order. There are plenty of splits you can break down but this is one way I try to find an edge.
I’m not sure why his name popped into my head but Hanley Ramirez has some interesting batting order splits.
Hanley smashed at leadoff. He was an offensive beast in his career and we have a large enough sample size to get a decent picture. Does this analyses take into account his historical teammate’s production, or at which point in his career these #s take place? No, but when you see long term trends, you can assume the numbers are at least semi-stabilized.
What stands out to me is that comparing his leadoff numbers to his 3rd spot numbers. In 300 less Plate Appearances, he has 2 more doubles, 17 more triples, only 6 less homeruns and had a better batting avg by .012 points. This isn’t something that is full proof, seeing these numbers for Hanley, I’d look to use him when he was batting 1st or 3rd and avoid when he’s batting 2nd and give a slight downgrade if he’s batting later than 4th. Seeing that the Red Sox have a pretty stacked lineup, it looks like he’ll be batting further down the lineup than he’s used to.
The top of their lineup is strong but he’ll have to be an RBI which surprisingly bodes well for him. It’s definitely a position difference between the 1st and 4th spots in the order but he has 6 more career RBIs from 4th in about 700 less PAs. It’s an interesting case study for sure.
Summary
The purpose of this section was to show you that not only is it important to monitor where someone is in a lineup, but sometimes when lineups get shifted around, you can point out where a person has done better or worse throughout their career.
Some people may not believe in this the way I do, but it’s something I’ve used to help myself over the years and if you have large enough sample sizes, you can see patterns among the numbers. I believe that there is a large mental component to the game and baseball players are probably the most superstitious in sports. They prefer routines and doing things the same way so sometimes when they are changed up, they react in certain ways. It’s similar to BVP in that there will be people who feels it has no impact and those who feel that it do, but I choose to use it to my benefit.
I’m not saying to put a ton of weight on the individual player’s performance in certain batting spots but don’t ignore the numbers.