Jamie: Batting second for the Tigers ... Miguel Cabrera?

Jamie Samuelsen, co-host of the "Jamie and Wojo" show at 6 p.m. weekdays on WXYT-FM (97.1), blogs for freep.com. His opinions do not necessarily reflect those of the Detroit Free Press nor its writers. You can reach him at jamsam22@gmail.com, follow him on Twitter @jamiesamuelsen and read more of his opinions at freep.com/jamie.

Who should bat in the No. 2 spot for the Detroit Tigers, and why?

When Miguel Cabrera used to bat fourth for the Tigers, I wondered why he didn't bat third. He was and is their best hitter. The No. 3 hitter will bat more times over the course of the season than the No. 4 hitter. And you start each game knowing that Cabrera will bat in the first inning.

Now that Cabrera regularly hits third, I wonder why he isn't batting second? Looking for the best option for the Tigers to hit second? Look no further than their very best player.

I'm not as forward thinking as the next person when it comes to advanced metrics. I've read others suggest this idea many times (particularly ESPN's Keith Law) so it's hardly an original thought. Traditionally, teams have put a speedy OBP guy in the leadoff position and a good contact hitter number two. The idea of course is to set the table for the big guns and wait for the three-run homer. It's a nice concept in theory, but it hardly ever works that way.

Based on Grapefruit League games and the way the talk has gone, manager Brad Ausmus will set his lineup around Cabrera hitting third and Victor Martinez hitting fourth. The top of the order figures to be some combination of Ian Kinsler, Rajai Davis and Anthony Gose depending on who's playing centerfield that day.

Kinsler has a career on-base percentage of .344 (.307 last season). Davis has a career .317 OBP and was .320 last year (.338 in the first half, .296 in the second). Gose has a career OBP of .301 for the Blue Jays.

Cabrera? As good as anyone in the game, .396 for his career and .371 last season even while playing gimpy for pretty much the entire season. If the goal of the top of the lineup is getting on base, nobody does it better than Cabrera. He's had an OBP better than .400 five times in his twelve year career.

The counter to this of course is – who's supposed to drive Cabrera in once he gets on base? The answer? The same guys who drive him in the rest of the game – Victor Martinez, Yoennis Cespedes, J.D. Martinez and Nick Castellanos. People get far too caught up in where a guy bats at the start of the game. When Jim Leyland shook up the order in the 2013 ALCS, dropping Austin Jackson down to eighth and batting Torii Hunter leadoff and Cabrera second, it shook up the baseball world in Detroit a little bit. It was the right move. It's the same move Ausmus should embrace.

The bottom line is simple; the Tigers don't have a player to bat second. Derek Jeter isn't walking through that door, nor is Placido Polanco or Alan Trammell. Instead of shoehorning Gose or Kinsler into that position, he should go with Cabrera. It immediately shrinks the holes in the first five hitters in the lineup (six if Castellanos has a strong second season). It also tells the opposing starters that they get to see Cabrera and Victor Martinez in the first inning of every game.

Research shows that each spot in the order gets 2.5% more at-bats over a season than the batter behind him. I won't pretend to try to figure out what that means in terms of WAR or runs gained. To put it into simple terms, it means that Cabrera walks to the plate about 20 more times than he would if he hit fourth over the course of a season. It means that Victor walks to the plate about twenty more times than he would if he hit fifth. You don't need to have an advanced degree in Sabermetrics to know that this means good things for the Tigers.

Advanced metrics are here to stay even if Brandon Phillips and Jim Leyland don't like them very much. This makes some of you very happy and others throw up a bit in their mouth. Advanced metrics are many things but they are, at the very least, measures of what make baseball players succeed and baseball teams win. They aren't full proof. But they are statistical measures of what can give you an edge. Hitting Cabrera second may not make sense in traditional baseball thinking. But it makes perfect sense when you look at the numbers. And it makes even more sense when you consider the fact that there will be 25 guys on this roster when the team heads north, and not a single one of them, other than Cabrera will be qualified to bat second every day.

Odds are that Ausmus won't do this. Baseball thinking takes a long time to move forward. He'd have some second-guessers if he did. But he'd also have legions of fans applauding him for a bold move. He'd also have other managers follow suit after he became the first one to try this strategy on a day-in, day-out basis. There are a lot of reasons to try it. There's a lot that could go right. There's just one simple question that I don't have the answer to. Perhaps someone can help me out with it.

That question: Why not?