Baseball 101: Lineup Orders

But what it essentially boils down to is that you want high OBP guys getting at-bats early in the inning (and the best OBP guy getting the most ABs, i.e. batting leadoff), and power bats coming in with men on base to drive in runs.

• Bat the guys with the best OPS 3rd and 4th.
  
• Take the next two highest OBPs and bat them 1st and 2nd, preferably with a base stealer leading off if you can.
  
• Order the rest based on SLG.

There's an optimum formula that guys from Baseball Musings devised that gets way more specific and twists the lineup all around, but allegedly produces more runs than any other combo given roughly static performances.  But the basic rules above are solid rules of thumb in lineup construction.

one of the reasons Yuni usually bats ninth is you can't have a slow guy running in front of Ichiro, both because he's fast and because he hits a lot of grounders.
Left-right matchups and alterations also play into it a lot. You want to play the odds in handedness matchups but not overdo it so as to leave the lineup vulnerable to lefty/righty specialists in late innings.

I was under the general umpression though, that there are few hard and fast rules, outside the obvious (put the guys who get on base the most higher up, put the guys who hit the ball hardest ust behind them to bring them in). Also, it doesn't matter that much at all, so long as a guy who can't hit righties doesn;t bat third against them etc.

There's also individual player qualities that will dictate this. Whoever bats behind a high OBP base stealer will see more fastballs thus its good to put a fastball hitter there.

#1: Scrappy guy who's fast and doesnt hit power.
#2: Top 5 hitter who doesn't fit.  Generally a veteran hitter w/ a decent average
#3: guy with high batting average and some power (RBI).  Must have veteran grit
#4: guy with lots of K's and lots of HR/RBI.  Must be veteran
#5: guy with high batting average or RBI but not both
#6: guy with averagish batting average and power
#7: Whatever is left over, maybe the higher RBI guy of the last 3.
#8: 2nd worst hitter on the team using reliable batting measures (RBI, AVG, HR, how his swing looks)
#9: Pitcher/Catcher/SS/2B - IE, doesn't hit a lick

All you need to know when selecting a batting order is each players RBI Total, Batting Average, Total Home Runs, how fast they are, stolen bases, how sweet their swing looks, and how long they've played, none of that other nerd-head stuff matters.

I think the biggest things I picked up from this thread so far are:

• Naturally, do what you can to get your best guys higher up the order so's they get more ABs in the game
  
• And yup, get your best OBP guy to leadoff
  
• Have someone patient batting immediately after your best basestealer, wherever he might be in the lineup
  
• Have someone fast, or at least with half a brain at #9 in case he gets on base ahead of your leadoff guy when he comes around again (this would lead me to wonder why a pitcher bats at #9 in the NL so often rather than at #8, say, but considering their low propensity to even get on base in the first place then I guess this factor is negated?)
  
• If a batter has a particularly good average with RISP then clearly they want to go 3rd or 4th
  
• Mere Tantilisers' point about the guy batting behind the basestealer seeing a lot of fastballs is good.

Outstanding questions, then:

1 - On the principle that you want to get your runners on base and follow them with sluggers, is there any wisdom in the idea of going:
On-base guy
Slugger
Filler
Filler
On-base guy
Slugger
for a stretch, to give the sluggers more of a chance to knock someone home? (pure speculation, I haven't thought about this enough)

2 - Is there any resource on the web that's happened to already calculate the likelihood that 0, 1, 2 runners are on base before the 3rd out in the first inning? I'd imagine that if there was any real science to it, this could be useful

3 - Presumably the #4 spot is coined the "clean up" hitter because the desire is that #1-3 have got themselves on base and the best result would be that he doubles, triples or homers to bring them all home?

Thanks, Gomez, for the Baseball Musings reference, I'll look that up.

I think I've learned from this thread that so long as the basics are followed, the more minute detail matter less. The problem with simulations, however, are that they're only reliable if the batter acts the same in a different position and circumstances than he did in that which you removed him from, and I suspect that's highly unlikely, particularly if he's a serial bunter.

---

Any more insight thoroughly welcome. Whilst there are some right wallies on here on occasion, the vast majority really seem to know what they're talking about and I'm quite serious when I say that reading this site (Jeff's insight and subsequent comments) have really helped me to appreciate the game of baseball far more than I'd have been able to just by watching mlb.tv.