Derrick Goold-Bird Land - Why doesn’t Albert Pujols bat 4th? Ask The Man

JUPITER, Fla. — With his first batting order of the spring pinned to the corkboard in the clubhouse, manager Tony La Russa met the media this morning to deal with some real lineup sticklers.

We read that lineup like it’s a horoscope, like the names fluttering here and there from spot to spot are so many tea leaves. Like it’s the Rosetta Stone to La Russa’s true feelings about his ballclub and the players that make it. So, when Rick Ankiel appears at cleanup for Game 1 — especially coming off a year when he had the look of a cleanup hitter — there are questions about it. When Joe Mather slides down to No. 9 (a move La Russa was sure to tell the third baseman about before doing it), there are questions about that. Khalil Greene hitting seventh? Questions.

Into that volley of lineup questions and La Russa replies, I floated this trial balloon: Would you ever, during spring training, take a look at hitting Albert Pujols cleanup? Just to see …

La Russa looked like he had just swallowed a dime.

“Where did Stan hit?” he said. “I’ll leave it that.”

Stan, of course, is the only Stan when it comes to the Cardinals — Stan Musial. And all the time we’ve spent digging through box scores and tracing the fault lines of his impact on the Cardinals in the past year or so, and the gut says, well, Stan always hit No. 3. Better check. On the indispensable Baseball-Reference.com, it is possible to see where Musial most often hit in the order and how he did at each place in the order. At least, it is possible for his final 1,000 or so games in the majors. Details from his early career aren’t available in the splits, but the final 1/3 of his career offers a glimpse of what La Russa implied.

Take a look (first At-Bats, then batting line — BA/OBP/SLG) for where in the lineup he hit during his final 1,038 games:

2 AB … .000/.333/.000
49 AB … .265/.410/.490
1,940 AB … .313/.391/.525
449 AB … .336/.416/.570
622 AB … .278/.363/.453
210 AB … .281/.359/.448
22 AB … .227/.370/.273
30 AB … .233/.303/.267
58 AB … .310/.431/.414

(Historical aside: Musial’s 3,000th hit came on May 13, 1958, and he got it from the nine spot, pinch-hitting for the pitcher and cracking a double at Wrigley Field.)

So Musial hit most in the No. 3 spot, but appears to have hit best in the No. 4 spot — with far fewer at-bats and hardly any real value as a oranges-to-oranges comparison. The reason for all of this is clear: Baseball tends to bat its best hitter No. 3. That’s part of La Russa’s theory. He wants Pujols to bat in the first inning — even if there is ample evidence that average outcomes of innings show that the cleanup hitter often hits with a man on base in the first inning and gets more cracks with men on base. (See: Troy Glaus in early 2008, when he was tops in the NL for a couple months.)

Earlier this spring, John Dewan’s Stat of the Day was what position in the lineup hits most often with at least a runner on base. There was only one spot in the order that had 50 percent of its at-bats with a runner on base: It was cleanup — at exactly 50 percent. The Nos. 3 and 5 hitters were tied for second, according to Dewan, with 48. Over the course of a season that’s the difference between, say, 300 at-bats and 288.

Clearly, one of the reasons why a cleanup hitter often has a runner on base is because the hitter ahead of him is The Best Hitter and The Best Hitters tend to be the ones who get on base a lot. QED. So, it’s not certain that if Pujols bats fourth he’ll have more at-bats with runners on base because he was that runner on base. If Pujols were to slide into the cleanup role, to make it work the Cardinals would have to have a No. 3 hitter worthy of replacing him. Are any positives — like a binge of RBIs — from Pujols hitting fourth negated by who hits third? And likewise, is the dropoff less at cleanup than it would be at No. 3?

La Russa used history as his advocate.

“I’ll ask Red,” La Russa said, referencing Hall of Famer Red Schoendienst. “I should ask him that. Why didn’t you hit Stan cleanup?”

-30-

Read more…

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!