Saturday, April 02, 2005

Batting Third: Tyke Redman

Ummm.... hmm. This is, ummm.....yeah.

Let's take a look at the McLogic that has led us to this point.

"Look, we can sit here and talk about why Tike is not the prototypical No. 3 hitter. But, if you want to talk about legitimate No. 3 hitters, we don't have one. We don't have Jim Edmonds. We make do with what we have, whether that's Tike or Bay or anybody else."

(To paraphrase..."You go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had." Nod to Don Rumsfeld.)

So...if you dont have a legitimate #3 hitter, and for the record what the hell is Jason Bay, just throw up your hands and stick anybody there.

(Let me suggest to Bay that he contact an attorney about pursuing a slander suit against McClendon for lumping him in the same category of hitter as Tyke Redman.)

I wonder if the same logic would apply to the bullpen. If you don't have a "legitimate closer" then why not just stick Johnny AAA in that role. Perhaps it also applies to the manager. If you can't afford a "legitimate manager", just stick Lloyd in there.

Just when you think you've heard it all, there's more. From Dejan's article:

Part of McClendon's motivation, as he explained it, is to move high-average players to the top. That would be Lawton (.277 last season), Jack Wilson (.308) and Redman (.280). This way, he added, he could minimize his team's glaring shortage of players with a history of good on-base percentage.

Let's analyze this gem. McClendon recognizes that it is advantageous to put your high OBP guys at the top of the lineup. But when he looks at the roster, he notices there aren't enough of these guys. So instead of making due with what he has, he decides to entirely ignore OBP and build the lineup around another statistic that isn't so cruel to his players. How this minimizes a shortage of high OBP players is left to our imagination.

If you recognize the importance of OBP, doesn't logic dictate that you build the lineup around your best OBP guys, even if your best isn't particularly good? McClendon has forgotten that statistics exist to help you measure performance, not justify decisions.

(Somewhere in here is a great topic for a Management by Baseball article based on cherry-picking metrics to suit your needs, reality be damned.)

In the final analysis, this decision probably won't have much of a lasting effect anyway. Redman is unlikely to hit well enough to justify batting third no matter what statistic you want to use. Even McLogic is bound to recognize this eventually.

posted by bkopec @ 10:26 AM   1 comments