How the Giants should arrange their batting order according to analytics

A few guys a lot smarter than me used math and protractors and telescopes to figure out the most efficient way to arrange a batting order if your goal is scoring the most runs possible. They wrote a book about it.

Now, sometimes I wonder if the main goal of the Giants is really scoring the most runs possible, but taking that for granted, let’s look at what they should do this year sans Scutaro’s dead back.

Here are the key Giants ranked by their OBP over the last two seasons (for Morse I used the last time he played over 100 games, which was 2012):

1. Posey - .371

2. Belt - .360

3. Sandoval - .341

4. Pence - .339

5. Pagan - .334

6. Crawford - .331

7. Morse - .321

8. Arias - .284

According to the magic book, the optimized batting order by OBP is 1, 3, 5, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9. Applying that to the above list we get:

1. Posey ®

2. Sandoval (S)

3. Pagan (S)

4. Belt (L)

5. Pence ®

6. Crawford (L)

7. Morse ®

8. Arias ®

9. Pitcher

First, the good news. The lineup does a good job of staggering left-handed and right-handed hitters. Beyond that, it’s pretty much crap.

Posey is slow. Pablo is slow (skinny Pablo not so much so). Having these two at the top of the lineup clogs the base paths like peanut butter. Pagan hitting third doesn’t work because he’s mostly a singles and doubles guy, and neither of those are probably going to score Posey or Pablo from first. Belt hitting forth is fine. And the rest of the lineup after him is not too bad. But look at those first three spots! Not good.

So let’s make a couple of tweaks. Let’s put our best (not slow) OBP guy hitting first, so our analytics nerds are happy. That’s Belt. And we can put skinnier Pablo hitting second because he’s got average speed (he beat out a double play this week, I swear).

1. Belt (L)

2. Sandoval (S)

Analytics say the third hitter should be the #5 OPS guy, but Pagan has as much power as a Fiat. This where we gotta be brave and embrace the weirdness of analytics. It’s okay if Pagan only extends the inning, because up next we have the MVP. And Belt can score from second on a Pagan slappy single

3. Pagan (S)

Analytics wants the second-best OPS guy batting forth, but we stole Belt to hit lead-off. Luckily we still got our best OPS guy on the bench, Mr. Posey.

4. Posey ®

Hitting fifth is the #4 OPS guy and that is Pence, and that actually makes old-school baseball sense.

5. Pence ®

Hitting sixth should be the #6 OPS guy, and that is Crawford. He has shown flashes of power, but I am still uneasy hitting him ahead of Morse. We’ll leave him here though to break up the right-handed hitters. The rest of the order shakes out as expected.

6. Crawford (L)

7. Morse ®

8. Arias ®

9. Pitcher

There it is. It’s a little weird, but I like it. Go Giants .

Wondering where Blanco is? I’ll talk about him and how he affects the batting order next time.

For the curious, below is a great FanGraphs post on batting order:

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/are-league-wide-batting-orders-more-optimized/