Banging out a Mets lineup in five minutes

The anti-Terry Collins approach to lineup creation

Former Mets manager Terry Collins once stated that he spent hours working on putting together the best batting order. To which my reply was – work smarter, not harder. Because at the end of the day, the lineup doesn’t matter nearly as much as many fans make it out to be. And with pitchers no longer hitting, you can essentially pull names out of a hat and not be at a tremendous disadvantage from whatever the optimal lineup may be.

The most important thing is to bat guys who get on base the most often at the top of the lineup. As long as you do that, everything should be okay. You probably don’t want to put three LHB back-to-back-to-back, either. No sense making it easy for the opposing manager to bring in their lefty specialist

Still, fans love to propose lineups, imagining that the right batting order is going to make a ton of difference. These same fans were thrilled that a certain first baseman was re-signed, imagining that was going to be the perfect player to provide lineup protection for the big offseason acquisition. These fans can’t imagine a scenario where these two players don’t hit back-to-back in the lineup.

Yet even with two lineup slots solidified in their mind, they still do their best Collins imitation and agonize over the other seven slots. In a way, this is the device that some fans use to talk about baseball. And there’s nothing wrong with that. You know, as long as somewhere you recognize that it doesn’t make a lot of difference when the games are actually played.

Back in 2009, Sky Kalkman did a nice summary of what was written about lineups in “The Book.” Kalkman wrote, “Believe it or not, the difference between an optimized lineup and a typical, mildly foolish one you'll see MLB teams use is only about one win over 162 games.” And in that piece was information about assembling an optimized lineup:

Another way to look at things is to order the batting slots by the leveraged value of the out. In plain English (sort of), we want to know how costly making an out is by each lineup position, based on the base-out situations they most often find themselves in, and then weighted by how often each lineup spot comes to the plate. Here's how the lineup spots rank in the importance of avoiding outs:

#1, #4, #2, #5, #3, #6, #7, #8, #9

So, you want your best three hitters to hit in the #1, #4, and #2 spots. Distribute them so OBP is higher in the order and SLG is lower. Then place your fourth and fifth best hitters, with the #5 spot usually seeing the better hitter, unless he's a high-homerun guy. Then place your four remaining hitters in decreasing order of overall hitting ability, with basestealers ahead of singles hitters. Finally, stop talking like the lineup is a make-or-break decision.

It's a good thing Keith Hernandez is napping. Just imagine his terrified reaction to the third-place hitter being only the fifth-most important slot in the lineup.

So, with the desire to talk baseball, with the full understanding that this matters very little in the overall scheme of things in the game, here’s one way that Carlos Mendoza could fill out the Opening Day lineup:

Francisco Lindor
Juan Soto
Mark Vientos
Brandon Nimmo
Pete Alonso
Jeff McNeil
Francisco Alvarez
Jesse Winker
Tyrone Taylor

Okay, I admit it, the above lineup was crafted specifically not to bat Alonso behind Soto. Allow me to have a moment of fun. Yet it’s far from certain to me who to bat in the third spot. McNeil might be the best option but then you’d have three LHB in a row, which you’d like to avoid. If Alvarez’ new hitting style takes hold, maybe he’s the guy. But at the end of the day, you know that’s where Alonso is going to be.

The bottom four doesn’t have an intuitive feel, as these hitters contain more power than the singles hitters usually found in these spots. If Starling Marte’s playing, he would be the guy to hit sixth, with his stolen base ability. But no one else really fits the bill

All right, I spent five minutes on the lineup, which feels about right. Now’s your chance to go make Collins proud. Extra points if you make it a Spring Training lineup and include guys with zero shot to make the real Opening Day team.

*****

Brandon Sproat gets the start in today’s Spring Training game. It’s a 1:00 p.m. start and the game is televised on SNY. There’s a game chatter if you’re interested —