Building a Better Lineup

Let's optimize this thing.

When I was a kid, I used to think about potential lineups for the Royals all day long. Most kids doodled in school, but I wrote lineups in the margins of my notebooks. If you’re reading this, there’s a pretty good chance you know exactly what I’m talking about and maybe you did the same thing, so that’s why I’m writing this today. I wrote a little bit about these in this week’s Lesky’s Notes on Royals Review, but I wanted to dive a little deeper. So let’s take a look at some lineup possibilities.

With the help of the Baseball Musings lineup optimizer, I plugged in the Royals starting nine in a couple different ways. First, let’s look at what the optimal lineup looks like using the PECOTA projections.

Carlos Santana
Jorge Soler
Hunter Dozier
Whit Merrifield
Salvador Perez
Michael A. Taylor
Andrew Benintendi
Adalberto Mondesi
Nicky Lopez

Okay, yeah, that’s not happening, but it’s sort of interesting, right? The idea is to get your best OBP at the top and then kind of fill in from there. That lineup is good for a 4.4 runs per game projection according to the simulator, which is a jump of about a quarter run per game from last year.

But what does it look like if we plug in that starting nine using numbers from, say, the last three seasons?

It’s not that different really.

Carlos Santana
Jorge Soler
Salvador Perez
Whit Merrifield
Hunter Dozier
Michael A. Taylor
Andrew Benintendi
Adalberto Mondesi
Nicky Lopez

But what’s interesting is that lineup is good for 4.9 runs per game in the analyzer. That would make the 2021 Royals the seventh highest scoring team in franchise history.

As fun as that is to mess with all day long using different stat sets, that’s not the reality of how a lineup is set. And while we didn’t get 162 games to learn how Mike Matheny is going to build his lineup, we did get 60 and we learned a couple things.

The first is that Merrifield is going to hit leadoff. He did that in 59 out of 60 games last season and the only exception was when Matheny hit Alex Gordon at the top of the lineup in the last game of the season. So Whit is going to hit at the top. The second is that he will try to minimize the plate appearances of guys like Lopez and Taylor. Lopez hit seventh, eighth or ninth in 44 games. He hit higher than that just seven times. So we at least have a starting basis for what we’re likely to see here.

I think Perez is going to hit third or fourth. He did that in all 37 games played last year. That might change as the season goes on if he doesn’t come close to replicating his 2020, but I think he starts either third or fourth. And Soler hit second, third or fourth in all 42 of his starts. Let’s put him fourth for now and see where we are.

Merrifield
2
Perez
Soler
5
6
7
Taylor
Lopez

See? We’re making real progress here!

I personally like the idea of Santana and his OBP hitting in the second spot, but I actually sort of wonder if Matheny will want to give him some run scoring opportunities and slide him between Perez and Soler. Putting Salvy and Santana back to back means some real slogs on the bases for two straight batters, but that OBP looks mighty nice at the start of a second inning or just in general in front of the team’s best power hitter. So that drops Soler to fifth in this lineup discussion. Additionally, it breaks up the righty bats, which is more of a Ned Yost thing, but also kind of important with the three batter minimum rule still in place.

We’re now left with just Benintendi, Mondesi and Dozier. I think it’d be easy to put Dozier in that sixth spot and then figure out who hits second and seventh from the other two, but there’s an argument to be made similar to the Santana/Soler that you’d rather have Dozier with a chance to drive in one of the faster guys (assuming Benintendi’s speed comes back when healthy) than the other way around, so I’m actually going to slot Dozier in seventh.

And here you have the perfect lineup platoon. Against lefties, Mondesi is a career .261/.286/.436 hitter, but since coming up to the big leagues for good in 2018, he’s a .279/.317/.478 hitter against lefties. Against righties since 2018, he’s hit .259/.296/.428.

Benintendi, on the other hand, is a career .278/.361/.459 hitter against righties and .243/.328/.363 against lefties. While he had been getting better against lefties every year of his career before 2020, there’s still a disparity that I think makes for a great two spot and six spot platoon with those two.

So where does that leave us? You probably figured it out, but I’ll show you anyway.

Whit Merrifield
Andrew Benintendi/Adalberto Mondesi
Salvador Perez
Carlos Santana
Jorge Soler
Adalberto Mondesi/Andrew Benintendi
Hunter Dozier
Michael A. Taylor
Nicky Lopez (and probably Hanser Alberto against lefties)

I still don’t love playing Taylor every day in center, but I’m not sure there’s an alternative right now. We’ll see Kyle Isbel in spring training, but I don’t see much of a chance he wins that job. The other candidates would be Nick Heath and Bubba Starling. While I like Heath, I think he serves well on the bench and Starling’s ceiling is probably Taylor, and even that may be too kind.

So there’s your lineup to face Kyle Gibson (probably, ugh) on Opening Day in just a little under seven weeks. Because, as you know, nothing ever changes between February 12 and Opening Day.