Lineup Construction by Pitcher Type?

Over the last few days I had the wonderful opportunity to spend some time with a long time NL front office exec. At one point the conversation turned to how well the Pirates did in the second half last year and I stated I thought it was primarily because of better defense behind better pitching. He agreed defense was the primary reason.

But then he told me there was another explanation - one that was just as important because it created a lot more luck for the Pirates than they were able to put together in the first half. It was a reason I hadn't heard before, and one that took me by surprise.

Bench match ups.

Taken aback, I wanted to know more. He said, do you think it was a coincidence that the team started winning more after Xavier Nady became a Pirate and Chris Duffy came back? I said I thought it was. In 2 minutes he showed me why it might not have been such a coincidence, and I'm going to try and explain those two minutes to you today.

He started off by telling me that as of June 29th last year, the Pirates lead off batter had the 6th best OBP in the National League, and 14th best in baseball. Chris Duffy had left about May 1st and Jose Bautista had been leading off. But the team had only won 27 games of the first 80 they had played.

That was a curious stat, he said, because the winning percentage of the 13 teams with OBP higher than the Pirates was .535, or .519 in the NL only. One reason the Pirates lost so many of those games was because our lead off batter had unproductive OBP.

Unproductive OBP, I muttered?

Sure, he said, the Pirates had the 5th highest number of lead off batter strikeouts in baseball and the 4th fewest number of walks. While the Pirates did had the 13th best lead off batter OPS on June 29th, it was useless OPS because most of the production came with few men on base.

Oh, I said, as a little light went off in my head.

In other words, he declared, the Pirates were spinning their wheels at the top of the order. After the break, that changed and he showed me how.

ESPN has a great statistic they keep that is often over looked - how batters do against certain pitcher types. For instance, if you follow this link and scroll down to the "By Pitcher" area, you'll see that Jason Bay has a career .913 OPS against power pitcher types. At the very bottom of that same page, ESPN shows you how they define each type.

When Nady was obtained and Duffy came back on to the roster, the exec went on to say, Tracy had the ability to better match up his available players against the type of pitcher the team was facing that day. While this availability didn't provide more runs scored than runs allowed over the second half, it played a huge role in their ability to win.

Before Nady was obtained, the only other person the Pirates had on their roster that could hit a finesse pitcher was Jose Bautista. When you compare Bautista's June production when he faced a lot of ground ball/finesse type pitchers, to his August when he faced more power pitchers, you'll see the difference real quick.. a .639 OPS vs a .910 OPS.

I said I had thought all along that the reason for most of the ups and downs in the Pirates production was because of streakiness of the players. He agreed it was, to some degree. But there is usually a reason for the streakiness, he declared. One of those reasons is feeling comfortable in the box against who you are facing, especially for younger players.

There you go.. one more person's take on why the Pirates did so well in the second half. So I took his idea one step further - I broke down most of the players on the roster against each of the main four pitcher types - power, finesse, ground ball, and fly ball, and here is the result:

A plus sign means the player hits that pitcher type better than not, a minus is just the opposite. The "+/-" sign means a neutral ability and you'll see that some players either hit the ball out of the park, or don't do anything against some pitchers. That is marked with a "slg+ rest-" sign.

I then put together proposed lineups based on the pitcher type we might face on any given day:

Notice that LaRoche gets his days off against finesse pitching, with Nady taking 1B and Bautista playing RF. Hernandez also starts at 2B that day. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get Castillo out enough, like against power pitchers, because there wasn't a better replacement for him, offensively or defensively. And Doumit never played a game because he simply lacks a position to play.

I also have Bay batting 4th more often than not. You can be sure Jim Tracy won't do that but he might consider it.

The end result won't be that the Pirates score a ton of runs. Instead, this proposal suggests it might create more luck than not, and luck is what propels us each year.

For those that want to create a cheat sheet, I have prepared a list of each of the five NLCD team starters and rated them based on the type pitcher they are. For instance, Jeff Suppan is rated a 9 in finesse. I simply divide 9 by the 411 finesse pitchers in the pool and subtract the result from 1.0 to get the percentile he is in.

In Suppan's case, that is the 98th percentile and a sure bet Jim Tracy is going to look hard at matching up his players to face him. At about the 60th percentile, you might start seeing less of a concern from Tracy on matching up his players and instead worrying about who is seeing the ball better that day.

Notice I didn't list fly ball pitchers. That is because so few rated out as a FB pitcher using the five year requirement ESPN uses to qualify them.