"…the negligible effect of batting orders on baseball…."-- Adam Gopnik, p. 73, The New Yorker,  4/3/17

The above quotation exemplifies a universal truth which people, nonetheless, perversely choose to reject overwhelmingly. We continue to discuss batting orders as if the strategy behind them has a pivotal effect on baseball games, even smart folks like us here on BJOL:  http://boards.billjamesonline.com/showthread.php?9586-Red-Sox-line​up-Are-they-even-in-touch-with-Bill-these-days .

Gopnik’s citation of batting orders’ unimportance appears in a stimulating article on the subject of prison reform—well worth reading, by the way, for those appalled by the monstrous Gulag-system in the U.S. (Ten-word version: prison overpopulation is caused primarily by prosecutorial power gone wild.)  I have no idea why I like beginning articles with irrelevant digressions before I introduce my main subject, so let me assure you that "the negligible effect of batting orders" will indeed become my main focus shortly.

But as long as I haven’t gotten started cooking yet, excuse my banging on these enumerated pots and pans first:

1) I am composing this draft longhand, in red ink on ruled paper, which I haven’t done in so long I can’t tell you whether it’s been years or decades since I last wrote anything in pen and ink longer than my signature.

2) If you’ve also gotten out of the habit of longhand composition, try a little experiment for me: write a page in longhand, trying to use the best, neatest, most legible handwriting you can conjure up. I’m finding that, try as I might (and I am trying mightily), my penmanship has deteriorated well beyond cryptography’s limits.

3) I’m not writing longhand for frivolous experimental reasons: my laptop screen this morning suddenly got tangled up in blue, and the laptop will now no longer even turn on. If one of you IT savvies wants to venture a guess why this occurs every few months, you will advance ahead of the IT folks at my university whose best response in the past has been a multi-syllable, often multi-paragraph version of "Shit happens."

4) I read that 14-month old article in the New Yorker because I plan on moving year-round to Florida, and moving my extensive collection of old magazines 1000 miles south seems wasteful both of space in the moving van and of my SoFlo apartment. So I’ve decided to read these old magazines before I move, and pitch them in the trash instead of in the van. Today so far I’ve educated myself on prison reform, Prince Charles’ upbringing, and Dana Schultz, a white artist who painted a controversial portrait last year of Emmett Till lying in his coffin.

5)  You might assume from the preceding paragraph that I’ve decided to retire from my academic career, and you are semi-right. I will teach six more courses in that career (or six more classes, all of the same course), all on-line, which in itself is sort of like being retired.

6) I will continue, however, to be pedantic.

7) On to batting orders (still prefatory stuff):  my earlier drafts (electronic, as this one will be eventually) approached the subject in my typically digressive fashion, by introducing my endless argument on that subject with Bill James all over this website for years. (Bill may not have noticed that we were having an argument, in much the same way that your windshield might not pay attention to the bugs flying kamikaze missions into it on the highway, but we were.)  Mostly Bill was asserting that pitchers need regular use and a secure knowledge of their precise roles, while I was questioning that assertion, unwisely using terms like "coddling" and alluding to the toughness of previous generations who worked multiple games of doubleheaders, up to four games per day, for stints of seven innings in each game, which Bill promptly blew apart with his hand-grenades of mockery. This argument is neither here or there or anywhere, except for this: how come batters (and fielders) neither need nor get offered anything resembling pitchers’ assurances of regular work on precise schedules?

Why do closers need to know with metaphysical certitude, as a certain prissy right-wing talk-show host used to put it http://snltranscripts.jt.org/90/90gmclaughlin.phtml, that they will pitch the ninth inning and only the ninth inning, and only when they are in line to get a save for their troubles? Bill’s non-hand-grenade response to this question went something laconic like "People do their jobs better when they know what their jobs consist of."  

As pitchers’ roles get more and more sharply defined, however, why has the batting order become less and less defined, to the point of utter irrelevance that Gopnik alludes to above? Batting orders matter less and less, according to contemporary wisdom, than they ever did, while pitchers’ use gets measured more carefully than we ever thought possible.  In moments of frustration, managers have historically resorted to pulling their batting orders out of a cap, illustrating how inessential a well-reasoned lineup may be, but now we’ve reached the point at which a random batting order is defended as making as much sense as any other. In purely practical terms, if no harm can be shown by jumbling up the order in which hitters bat (or batters hit), then a batter can shifted from leadoff to #8 to #2 to cleanup on successive days and not feel that his role on the team is being undermined.  But if there’s no harm that can be shown, wouldn’t there still be some psychological or morale benefit (as Bill argues current pitchers enjoy) in knowing how batters and fielders will be used, and when, and why?

Has it been shown that pitchers suffer harm when they were used in fluid roles? Sure, they LIKE knowing when they’ll pitch, and when they won’t, but demonstrating actual harm resulting from role-fluidity is a whole different order of difficulty. There are too many competing factors that go into injuries to fix one cause with certainty, or to rank causes in some sort of hierarchy, and there’s no way of knowing what the results would have been if managers had continued to use their pitchers in the random, mercurial, cruel, heedless, reckless fashion of previous decades, shuttling them in and out of the rotation and the bullpen like so many puppets, telling them to relieve, or even to start, on very short rest. It is certain that pitchers continue to suffer from physical damage to their arms, of course, but whether this is due to overuse, or misuse, or poor training regimens, or throwing a more dangerous array of pitches than previous generations of pitchers, is unknown and probably unknowable. We do know that pitchers now are closely monitored for the number of pitches thrown in a game, and in an inning, and in a season, and in an off-season, and in the bullpen warming up, and between starts,  and in consecutive games, and before the age of 21, and on and on and on, yet I haven’t noticed any radical reduction in pitchers going on the DL. Off the top of my head, I’d say that, despite this astonishing array of new protective measures, pitchers are going on the DL at least as much today as they ever did.

It might just be, of course, that without all these new protections against injury, current pitchers would injure themselves even more frequently than they do, although that would be hard to imagine. In 2017, no pitcher started more than 34 games or threw more than 214 innings. In 1968 (with only 20 MLB teams, mind you), no fewer than 29 pitchers started 34 games or more, and 45 pitchers threw more than 214 innings (led by Denny McLain in both categories, 41 starts and 336 IP.)  There’s no question but that a great deal more care is taken today to protect pitchers from injury, not least by this sharp reduction in their workloads, but the DL is used at least as much as it ever was for pitchers. Indeed, the increased use of the DL is one of the direct causes of that sharply reduced workload. Pitchers complaining of sore arms are no longer routinely treated callously, no longer mocked by their managers as having low thresholds of pain, questioned by coaches for being malingering deadwood, found by trainers to be hypochondriacs, accused by owners of spitting the bit, ridiculed by sports-columnists as lacking in manhood, booed by fans for being quitters. All of these sources of calumny are now agreed that pitchers must shut down, at least for a thorough medical examination, at the first sign of possible injury, and if that exam is in the least ambiguous, that they must spend the next 10 days on the DL. Kinda hard to get your 40 starts and 300 IP in, as several of 1968’s worthies did, in this risk-averse atmosphere.

So if pitchers are working under much less harsh conditions, and they’re still going on the DL with great frequency, it’s going to be difficult to show how overuse (or misuse, or lack of strict roles, or lack of pitch-counts, etc.) leads to injury. You might suppose that once the light bulb went off over Baseball’s head that it was the 120^th pitch that was the fatal one, or the 30^th pitch in an inning, or the 35^th start in a season, or whatever, we would see a sharp reduction in DL visits, but no, DL visits just continue to climb as more and more strictures against pitching under dangerous conditions continue to be invented.

Obviously, it is the act of pitching itself that is inherently dangerous. It is unnatural and stressful on the arm to pitch, in a way that batting or fielding are not inherently stressful acts. So you want to protect against abuse, only we haven’t quite defined what "abuse" consists of. We think it might be too many pitches in an outing, but it might be, well, all the things that I just enumerated, or any combination of them, that will lead to a sore or permanently damaged arm. Since pitching, with rare exceptions (Ryan, Seaver, Lolich, et al.), leads to some sort of trauma to the arms that perform it, better to be safe and curtail it in some way. We haven’t yet figured out what that way should be.

In the course of curtailing it, I think the psychological aspects (what Bill calls "knowing what their jobs will be") have been folded into the general protection of pitchers’ arms, and probably IMO a little unnecessarily. When the dominant protocol for managers was "pitch anybody on the team in any role you like, as much or as little as you like" we couldn’t have closers, 9^th inning specialists charged with finishing close victories, because their talents would be wasted. It would be like deciding to take your cleanup batter out of the game after two at-bats: Why would you do that?  Before there was a perceived danger in, say, having your best reliever throw 60 pitches, it would be wasteful not to have him go out to pitch the 8^th inning before pitching the 9^th, or even to get him out there in a crucial jam in the 7^th and then finish the game. But when it became de rigueur to limit his pitches to one inning’s worth, and when we devised the definition of a "save," then all this stuff began about the closer knowing what his role would be.

Thought experiment: say we had jettisoned the whole "save" thing, after about five seasons, sort of like we did with the "game-winning hit." It was stupid, it was imprecise, it was ill-defined, we were putting too much emphasis on something that wasn’t all that and a bag of chips, etc.  So there’s no save rule any more (and no "hold" rule, either, but skip that for now). And also suppose that we had discovered that there isn’t any measurable harm to most relievers in throwing 40 pitches in a game. Say we came up with some hard evidence that the danger point came after 40 or 45 pitches—up to that point, it doesn’t matter if a reliever throws 10 pitches in a game or 35. With the pitch-count thus minimized, and with the "save" rule abandoned, would there still be a purely psychological advantage to the closer in knowing that he wouldn’t start work until the 9^th inning?

I doubt that very much. If a 35-pitch outing were decreed as safe as milk, and if there were no "saves," I think your closer could know that he’d come into games sometimes at the start of the 8^th, sometimes in the 7^th, sometimes in the 9^th, and he would perform exactly as well as he does now. The "knowing" when he’ll pitch is a tiny part of why he is now used (almost) exclusively to start the 9^th inning.

Was there any difference, back when pitchers used to throw routine two-inning saves, in quality of performance in the 8^th and 9^th inning? I’d like to go back and see if Goose Gossage or Sparky Lyle or other ‘70s relief aces showed a higher ERA, or WHIP, or anything, in the 9^th inning than in the 8^th. Actually, a higher ERA makes a little sense, not because of the worn-out pitchers’ arms in the 9^th inning but because of the higher quality pinch-hitters they would likely be facing as the opposing manager looked to fire his last remaining bullets. Still, I’ll venture the guess that there would be no significant difference between the quality of the pitching in the eighth vs. in the ninth. And if true, this would argue against any psychological advantage in knowing what a reliever’s role would be.

For position players, there is no such advantage offered or taken.  Why don’t pinch-hitters get the benefit of hearing their managers’ thoughts as pinch-hitting opportunities loom? Or defensive subs? Or the whole bench in potential double-switch situations? Instead position players seem to cope just fine, on a few minutes’ notice, sometimes a few seconds, before they’re told to grab a glove, or grab a bat, or grab some pine, or "Loosen up, I’m putting you in as a runner, as of 4 seconds ago when this idea occurred to me." They don’t get notice, they don’t need notice, their jobs consists of always being ready to go into the game at any moment, in any role.

I’m not complaining for their sake, only observing that the protocol that pitchers seem to require differs radically from the one that batters and fielders live with.

The sort of knowledge that pitchers now have about the precise nature of their roles is helpful, no doubt, to pitchers. I don’t doubt that pitchers enjoy the security of knowing how they’ll be employed. What this security translates into in terms of better pitching, however, is unclear. This is devilishly tricky to nail down because there are so many variables that enter into evaluations of "pitching" in general: how can you possibly tell that the difference in overall MLB ERA, for example, between any two years in MLB is caused by a greater knowledge of pitchers’ roles rather than any number of other factors?  An increase in ERA, for example, doesn’t necessarily show that pitching is getting worse, but rather that it might be getting better, only not as quickly as hitting is getting better. (Which I think is generally true.)  To do a truly fair comparison between 1980s pitching and its equivalent in 2010, you’d need to have the 1980s pitchers throwing to 2010s batters, who are (presumably) much improved over the previous generation of batters. It’s very hard to show that more knowledge of pitchers’ precise roles, or more security from that knowledge, or anything of the sort, is a significant factor in improved pitching.

(BTW, a seemingly objective yardstick of ability would be the average speed of pitches as measured by radar guns, except I have no idea whether today’s Miles-Per-Hour are equivalent to those measured by the radar guns of thirty years ago. When I was researching my last article, that digressed into a rant on the subject of Nolan Ryan, I noticed him sort-of-bragging in his autobiography that he once hit 100.9 MPH, which figure has since been exceeded regularly—but is Ryan’s maximum-MPH figure from the 1980s an apple compared to current radar gun readings, or a cantaloupe? If half the pitchers in the majors are capable of throwing in the very high 90s, and only Ryan was capable of reaching that speed thirty years ago, then does that attest to the greater reflexes of current  batters?  Of course, current hitters are also striking out at unprecedented rates, but so did the batters who faced Ryan. Now, not so much. But I digress again…)

8) (You forgot that was all digression #7, right?) Anyway, what I wanted to express here was not so much a continuation of my previous argument with Bill over the coddling/respect given to contemporary pitchers by assigning them strict roles in which they feel comfortable doing their jobs, but almost the opposite of that: how come there is no attempt to assign batters (or fielders) such strict roles, and (thereby presumably) increase their comfort levels accordingly?

It’s always been a little puzzling, not only in our era but throughout baseball as far back as I can recall, why batting orders show as little stability as they do.  If you look at the batting order charts of particular teams on baseball-reference.com, you might be struck by their incessant mutability. We’re all pretty much used to it by now, but I sometimes find the announcing of tonight’s batting order a little strange: the day-to-day turnover of most teams’ batting orders is far greater than can be explained by the need to rest a regular, or the handedness of tonight’s opposing pitcher, or such. Sure, that sort of stuff explains why tonight’s batting order differs in some regards from last night’s, but the sheer total number of lineups most teams use over the course of a season is much higher than can be rationalized by that sort of stuff. Much of the instability of batting orders just seems whimsical to me.

An extreme example is the early Mets’ teams I grew up watching:  https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/NYM/1963-batting-orders.shtml  (If you want to check it out with a team of your own choosing, which I warn you gets addictive, go to a year’s BBREF page for your team and on the menu line, offering a choice of Stats/Schedule & Results/Roster/Uniforms/Batting/Pitching/Fielding/Scoring/Other, choose "Other" and one of your options will be "Batting Orders.")  At the bottom of the Batting Orders page, there is a summary chart that, among other things, reveals that team’s total number of different batting orders used that season. For the 1963 Mets, it shows that 142 different batting orders (slots 1-8) were used that year, a mind-boggling total if you stop to think about it.  Counting pitchers, in slot #9, they used 159 different batting orders in 162 games. With only a little more effort, the 1963 Mets could have used a different batting order in every single game they played. Exactly one time, the Mets used the same batting order 1-8 for three straight games, August 11-15, 1963. I’m thinking they must have been wracked by short-term injuries that week.

In terms of stability, this is a crazy policy, switching up your batting order every single day of the season, right? As I say, this is an extreme example, caused by a combination of Casey Stengel, who liked keeping his players on edge, and the early Mets, who would make anyone think "Oh, God, I’ve got to try SOMEthing different!", but the principle of "Always Switch SOMEthing"  applies to even the most solid and productive of lineups. Rarely do even the most stable of teams use the same lineup from one day to the next, and even after accounting for such rational explanations as "handedness" or "resting regulars" there’s far more instability than can be explained. In a relatively stable lineup, often players will be moved up or down in the batting order without any obvious employment of reason.

At the opposite end of the offensive-competence spectrum from the 1963 Mets, the 1962 Giants outscored everyone this side of Wilt Chamberlain. And do you know how many times in that 165-game season the Giants used their most common batting order? Only ten times.  And the most consecutive uses of one batting order was five, from April 11-April 16.  Not counting pitchers, the 1962 powerhouse Giants used 108 different batting orders, or roughly two-thirds of the season’s games. Does that seem to be a lot of unnecessary instability? It does to me, just musing abstractly.

Those Giants could be said to have the opposite problem from the Mets of the next year: too many excellent hitters rather than too few. But the same sorts of issues persist as to the instability.  Alvin Dark, the Giants’ manager, seemed to find a virtue in NOT sticking his players in a batting-order slot and leaving them there, even at positions that had abnormally stable personnel. Jose Pagan (ss), Willie Mays (CF), Orlando Cepeda (1B), Chuck Hiller (2B), Felipe Alou (RF) and Jim Davenport (3B) averaged 158 games apiece. (Catching was split between Tom Haller and Ed Bailey, both lefthanded batters, and LF was split mostly between Harvey Kuenn and Willie McCovey, a true platoon.)  So you might think that this was an environment that naturally leads to pretty good stability: these six batters (plus Kuenn, who played 130 games) were all veterans, giving Dark a pretty good idea from the get–go about the type of hitter each man was. He could have written "Willie Mays cf" third on the lineup card pretty much every single game, for example, and know that his #3 batter was going to do an exemplary job of driving in the table setters batting #1 and 2, and also get on base and run the bases well enough to be driven in by the sluggers batting behind him.

So how come Mays only batted in the #3-hole 117 times out of 162? I’m sure Dark had his reasons each time, but 45 games moving Mays up or down in the lineup? Whatever else Dark was accomplishing, he certainly wasn’t sending Mays a clear message about the vital role he played in the team’s batting order. If stability was anything like a priority, wouldn’t you take the world’s best #3 hitter (the world’s best HITTER, IMO, but let that go) and tell him "You bat third" and for the rest of the year, know that you had only the other eight slots to think about?

It’s more than Mays, of course. For the first third of the 1962 season (58 games), Dark realized he had a great cleanup hitter in Orlando Cepeda, and for the first 58 games Cepeda proved him right:  .325 BA, 15 HR, 55 RBI—multiply by three, and you get a pretty good season. But suddenly on June 9^th, Cepeda is removed from the cleanup spot and from then on, he never spends more than 10 consecutive days batting in the 4-hole. He mostly bats there for 3, 4, 5 games at a clip before being briefly replaced by F. Alou, McCovey or Mays.  He’s not injured, because he’s usually batting 5^th or 6^th during these stretches. On September  2^nd, he bats third, ahead of McCovey and then Mays, which seems to be a perverse use of running speed if there ever was one.  Obviously Dark saw a virtue in batting Cepeda cleanup for the first two months of the year, and then he saw a virtue in moving him in and out and in and out of that slot for the rest of the year.

Or take the leadoff slot. Dark’s main leadoff hitter is Harvey Kuenn, who bats in that slot exactly two-thirds of the season, 108 games, platooning pretty much with McCovey. But for a month and a half, 38 games between June 23^rd and August 3^rd, Kuenn bats leadoff only sporadically, only 13 times in those 38 games. Kuenn obviously isn’t injured—he gets some starts in other slots, and he does lead off in those 13 games spread out over the six-week stretch. And then on August 4^th he’s restored to the leadoff slot, starting 33 out of the next 35 games there.

This indecisive pattern holds for most of the lineup, if not all. I don’t mean to single out Al Dark for his whimsical ways here, and I’m sure many of these moves were made for sound baseball reasons—I’m just citing him because this seems typical of most managers.  Dark had an unusually healthy, unusually productive offense that season, where he wasn’t in fact forced into all sorts of emergency measures, needing to improvise his lineup on a daily basis. He knew who his batters would be, knew what they were capable of, saw that they were producing the way they could produce all year—and yet he kept tinkering, experimenting, fooling around with his regulars in different batting slots all season long.

One more example: Jim Davenport was his 3b-man (Jim Ray Hart was still in the minors) and a good one. Dark batted Davenport substantially in four different slots all season long: 41 times sixth, 36 times seventh, 28 times second and 26 times eighth. He has him moving around at the bottom of the order for the first half of the year, never batting in the same slot for seven consecutive days, but suddenly on July 2^nd Dark puts him in the #2 slot and leaves him there for next 17 consecutive games. It looks like he’s settled upon Davenport as his #2 guy, but then on the 29^th of July, he moves him back to the bottom of the order, and bats him second only on 4 widely separated occasions for the rest of the season.

Again, I’m not qualified to question Dark’s judgment, only to point out how these patterns show a lack of definite ideas in Dark’s mind about his batting order. He seems to have adjusted his thinking on an almost daily basis. Here’s that most common batting order of his in 1962, slots #1-8, the one he used only ten times, although all of these players were healthy the whole year long:

Kuenn

Hiller

Mays

Cepeda

Alou

Bailey

Pagan

Davenport

[Pitcher]

Other than starting McCovey against righties and giving Haller some starts behind the plate (Haller actually started more games than Bailey), no reason sticks out that this wasn’t Dark’s default lineup, one he could have used many, many times more than the ten times he did use it. (The conventional thinking of our day, btw, would probably have Mays batting second, behind the Giants’ only decent singles hitter with a good OBP, who was Kuenn, but no one in 1962 thought of Mays or Mantle or Aaron as #2-hole guys—that slot was reserved for bunters, hit-and-run guys, and practitioners of other small-ball strategies that have faded from fashion.)

Another very stable lineup of the 1960s was that of the 1969 Cubs, managed by Leo Durocher, who has drawn considerable criticism for playing his regulars to death, though in fact his main seven (Williams, 163 games; Santo, 160; Kessinger, 158; Banks , 155; Hundley 151; Hickman, 134; and Beckert, 131) averaged 150 games, a little less than the average of 1962 Giants’ Big Seven.  Al Dark, however, has neatly sidestepped the barrage of criticism that Durocher has received for flogging his horses in the noonday sun.  Winning a pennant will deflect an awful lot of criticism, I suppose. (Speaking of sidestepping criticism, you remember how Ralph Houk’s baseball IQ is questioned for relying on his shortstop Tony Kubek and his second baseman Bobby Richardson, both paid-up Life Members of the Barely-.300 OBP Club, to bat 1-2 in his lineups? Well, when Dark wasn’t using Kuenn, with a .357 OBP, as his leadoff batter, he also used his shortstop and second baseman to bat 1-2, and neither Pagan nor Hiller managed to crack a .300 OBP for their careers.) Unlike Dark, however, Durocher did resist switching around his regulars: not only did Kessinger, Beckert, Williams, Santo, and Banks bat 1-2-3-4-5 over 120 times, it would have been more like 150 times but for a jammed thumb Beckert suffered on D-Day that caused him to miss 26 straight games from June 7^th through June 30^th that year. Rightfielder Hickman, also, didn’t earn his right to bat in the 6-hole regularly until late, getting off to a terrible start, batting .212 with 7 HRs and 23 RBI for the first two-thirds of the seasons, but .258/14/31 for the final third, as every other Cubbie went into a slump. Hickman batted 6^th 32 times in the Cubs’ final 42 games of 1969. Hundley mostly batted 7^th after Hickman moved into the 6-hole, and the 8^th slot was almost exclusively manned by the terrible rookie centerfielders the Cubs used all year long. A more stable lineup you will hardly find. The Cubs used only 59 different batting orders all season long, excluding pitchers.

Durocher being of the previous generation to Dark (he was in fact Dark’s manager for most of Dark’s playing career), do batting orders get more stable the earlier we search through baseball’s history? I would assume so, if only because of what little I know about the way uniform numbers began on the Yankees, #3-slot batter Ruth getting assigned #3, cleanup batter Gehrig getting #4, etc.  (7^th place-hitting middle infielder Durocher wore #7, btw, on the 1928 Yankees, and leadoff batter Combes wore #1, second-place hitter Koenig wore #2, #5-hitter Meusel wore #5, #6-batter Lazzeri wore #6 and #8-batter Grabowski wore #8, though there were  necessarily anomalies. Joe Dugan, who batted mostly 7^th, getting 21 more games in that slot than Durocher, wore #25. (2+5 = 7?) Obviously, such a system has to break down very soon, as new players break into the lineup, but clearly Yankees in 1928 could easily tell something about their role and slot in the lineup by looking at the backs of their uniforms.)  That Yankee team used only 54 different lineups, with most of the changes coming in the #7 slot—otherwise it was pretty much Combes-Koenig-Ruth-Gehrig-Meusel-Lazzeri-Dugan-Grabowski all season long.

The 1928 Browns used 49 batting orders, the A’s used 54, the Indians used 59, the Senators used 67, the Tigers used 69, the White Sox used 81, the last-place Red Sox used 84. So the Yankees were just doing what other AL teams did, use between 49 and 84 different 1-8 lineups in 1928. If you look the lineups over hastily, as I just did, you’ll find a lot of consecutive games for individual players at a single slot and fielding position, leading perhaps to the conclusion that stability was more the order of the day than it became after Durocher and Dark stopped managing. The 1969 Cubbies’ 59 lineups would fit neatly into the AL of 1928, but them days are gone.

It’s funny, but I would have sworn that lineups, in an age that valued pitchers knowing what their roles would be and also an age of declining numbers of position players on a 25-man roster, would be at record-low levels about now. Instead, most teams I’ve checked have shot way beyond 1962 Giants’ territory and have gone well into 1963 Mets’ territory. Offsetting the roster-spots available at any given time (now most teams carry only 4 or 5 bench players, as opposed to 7 or 8) is, of course, the expanded use of the DL and the frequent recalling of AAA players to substitute for injured players, giving managers expanded palettes to paint new lineups with. I got the idea for this article by realizing that I never had a clear idea anymore what the batting order would be in tonight’s game. Literally none. I had no clue who would be batting where, and I had no clue who would be playing each position.

It started with my admiring the Mets’ good young outfielder Brandon Nimmo. It’s hard not to admire him. He hits, he fields, he runs the bases with aggressiveness and finesse. One day, when he was playing right field, I noticed that he wore the number 9, Roger Maris’s number, and played Maris’s position. He also batted lefthanded and bears a certain facial resemblance to Maris as well. (He looks more like Barry Pepper, who played Maris in the movie "61," and he’d resemble both of them a lot more if he didn’t smile so much.  There are only two photographs ever taken of Maris smiling in the 1961 season, one of them taken in Maris’s sleep. He still holds the Yankees’ team record for "Most Consecutive Days Puss, Sour.") Anyway, I was musing about our new right fielder, and trying to figure out if he also batted third in the order, as Maris often did, and I realized that he batted in a different slot all the time. Some nights he led off, some nights he batted third, other nights he batted fourth, still other nights second.

And I had no idea if he was a right fielder, or a center fielder, or a left fielder. Likewise with Michael Conforto, who sometimes was a center fielder leading off, sometimes was a left fielder batting second, other times a right fielder batting fourth. Thinking back to 2017, it was the same: Curtis Granderson played all over the outfield, and all over the batting order. Wilmer Flores, forget about it—he doesn’t have a clue where he’s playing on a given night, and he started in every slot except leadoff. Asdrubal Cabrera plays all over the infield, and up and down the lineup—it’s a hot, sloppy mess and I was used to it.

They actually have a firmly set outfield, not involving Nimmo or Conforto or Granderson: Jay Bruce plays only RF, Juan Lagares is an excellent CFer, and Yoanis Cespedes, for reasons known only to him, insists on playing LF, though his skill-set (strong arm, good speed) screams RFer or (a little less high-pitched scream) CFer. So you’d suppose we’d be set, except Bruce isn’t hitting (and is now hurt), and Lagares and Cespedes are more or less permanently injured, so the Mets have been playing musical chairs in the outfield for most of the past year. In such a perilous environment, you might expect the Mets to impose stability wherever they can, but manager Mickey Calloway seems to prefer making a different lineup card every night. He seems to think that’s his primary job, and he’ll get fired if he does something as lazy as submitting the same lineup card two nights running. In 75 games so far, he’s used 68 different orders (not counting pitchers) and never the same one more than twice.

So my conclusion is that batting orders, indeed, do not matter.  If there is any purely psychological advantage to letting players understand exactly when they will be employed in a game, it’s reserved exclusively for pitchers, who have plenty of non-psychological, non-morale-related reasons for being used sparingly, though we are far from figuring out the precise nature of that sparing use for pitchers. I don’t think their state of mind enters into the equation, except that, as Bill says, they prefer knowing to not-knowing when they will be used. Managers, however, have shown a strong proclivity for ignoring position players’ senses of security in that regard, so I continue to minimize the importance of the pitchers’ self-esteem.