That is to say, which Mets lineup and batting order scores the most runs. You want to score more runs than the other team.

By John Edwards

The Mets are practically tripping over themselves with leadoff batter candidates this season. It feels like Mickey Callaway could pick names out of a hat and be just fine: Amed Rosario, Todd Frazier, Juan Lagares, or Michael Conforto have all been discussed as possible fits for the role. But with the Mets’ surprising start to the season and a chance at the NL East, it’s worth their due diligence to try to squeeze every run that they can out of the Mets’ batting order, and that includes determining the right leadoff hitter for the job. Given the available candidates, it’s a tall order.

The Mets kind of have too many leadoff hitters, somehow. Rosario and Lagares fit a traditional leadoff hitter profile as contact hitters and fast runners, the type of guys who will slap a single up the middle and swipe a base. Frazier and Conforto fit the sabermetric leadoff hitter profile of a high OBP, high BB% plate approach with optional power. We’ll take an analytic approach in seeing which Mets player might fit best in the leadoff slot.

An optimized lineup generally places hitters who get on base frequently towards the top, and hitters with power towards the middle of the order — so to figure out the Mets’ best leadoff hitter, we should determine the best overall lineup, and see who’s on top.

I used the same method when discussing the Yankees’ optimal lineups for Marc Carig in The Athletic last month. If you’re interested in the guts of the algorithm, you can read about that more here. Here’s the cliff notes version of what I did:

I first calculated the average run value of a plate appearance outcome for hitters for National League hitters in 2017 depending on where in the order that hitter was. For example, a home run was worth about 1.27 runs for batters in the leadoff spot, but worth 1.44 runs for cleanup hitters. Then using the Mets’ split projections for 2018 from Steamer as estimates of the Mets’ production, I calculated Mets players’ expected rates of different plate outcomes (1B, 2B, 3B, HR, ball-in-play-out, SO, NIBB, HBP) for the 2018 season. Then I generated some potential defensive configurations against LHP and RHP for the Mets, based on defensive alignments already run out this season. At the last second, I had to replace the recently-injured Travis d’Arnaud with Tomas Nido where applicable. (For now, you can replace Nido with Jose Lobaton and his career .295 OBP if the Mets choose to do the same.)

To find the best lineups among these configurations, we will need to find all possible permutations of these lineups (all 362,880 of them per defensive configuration!) and calculate the expected run values for each lineup, based on a player’s average run value when batting in that spot and by average plate appearances each lineup spot sees during a season. The lineup with the highest run value total is the most optimized lineup.

Behold! The best lineups generated:

Okay, so using a similar model (which is just based on expected run production from projected per-PA values), you lose about .023 runs per game (~4 runs per season) batting the pitcher 8th, but using a Markov-chain model, you *gain* about .012 runs per game (~2 runs per season).

Conforto receives high marks for his OBP prowess — walks in the leadoff spot are the third most valuable, and strikeouts are less punishing in the leadoff spot than anywhere else in the order. Combine that with Conforto’s overall superb OBP (projected for .359 OBP against RHP), and you got yourself an ideal sabermetric leadoff hitter in our right handed lineups, and in configurations of similar run value, Todd Frazier also appears as a likely leadoff candidate.

The surprise might be Rosario. Despite not being projected as a superb hitter against lefties in 2018 (.299 wOBA, .307 OBP), Rosario goes to the top of the lineup because most of the other Mets in configuration B simply are not good against lefties. Because of the jockeying to make sure Yoenis Cespedes and Wilmer Flores, arguably the only projected lefty mashers, are in the middle of the lineup, Rosario floats to the top.

How do the rest of the lineups stack up? Something that might pop out is Adrian Gonzalez’s placement in the second lineup spot in configurations C and D. For a guy who I’ve railed against in the past as not a good hitter, Steamer projects Gonzalez as the Mets’ 4th best hitter against RHP by wOBA. The guys ahead of him slot into other roles in the lineup — Conforto’s OBP already makes him an ideal leadoff hitter, and Jay Bruce and Cespedes’ bats fit better further down in the order. Wonder of wonders, Gonzalez slots in nicely in the second spot of the order.

You’ll notice that an auspicious member of the Mets is missing.

SNY/MLB

While he’s probably sitting somewhere on a base in the Las Vegas desert, we might see Brandon Nimmo play some time again this season, even if his path to a starting job is ostensibly blocked by Cespedes, Conforto, Bruce, and Lagares. Analysts have raved about his prowess as a leadoff hitter, but does that hold water? Let’s use a variant of configuration C, moving Bruce to first base and Nimmo to the outfield, to see if our model agrees with Nimmo as a lead-off hitter.

The answer is a resounding yes! In lineups where he’s included, of the top possible lineup orders, Nimmo frequently led off. But according to Steamer’s projections, it’s a net loss to include Nimmo — no matter if he’s replacing Bruce or Gonzalez in the lineup, since he is projected as a weaker hitter by wOBA against RHP (.318 for Nimmo, .338 for Bruce, and .331 for Gonzalez). In a lineup with Nimmo leading off, the team will still score fewer runs than ones with Bruce and Gonzalez in it. The runs gained by optimizing and placing Brandon at the leadoff spot do not compensate for the overall loss of offensive strength in the form of losing Bruce/Gonzalez.

Which should serve as an excellent example of a major caveat involving this analysis: it’s tough to squeeze runs out of a lineup! It’s always a good idea to get the most runs out of your batting order and optimizing it to the degree that your batters are comfortable with. Compared to a “traditional” lineup, an optimized lineup will only score about 5–10 more runs over the course of a season. (The difference between the most optimized lineup and the 10th best optimized lineup, according to this system, is less than a run over the course of a season.) That margin is well within the expected uncertainty of virtually every projection system, so a team could easily swing and miss with optimizing lineups based off of projections.

In other words, there’s a lot of unavoidable error involved — never mind the fact that your best hitter might have their own personal preference to hit in a slot. Rolling out a slightly-less-than-optimal lineup won’t produce any noticeable difference in a game much less over the course of a season. And the perfect leadoff hitter (intrinsically tied into lineup optimization) might not necessarily be what’s best for the lineup, as Nimmo evidences.

But it’s still worth the exercise, I promise. In a close divisional race — which, come August, the Mets may very well find themselves in* — it’s important to extract as many runs as you can … without ruining your clubhouse chemistry. Keeping your players happy has to be worth more than a couple runs. It’s just something you can’t quantify.

*No whammy

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